Villa and guest house construction in Batumi on your own plot

Villa and guest house construction in Batumi starts with a simple question: how the house will be lived in. A family that comes for the whole summer and guests who change every few days need different houses. The family needs storerooms, a study and quiet bedrooms. Guests need separate entrances and finishes that stand up to a constant flow of people.

Homes to live in

A private house, a cottage and a villa differ mainly in size and level of finish, but for the design something else matters more: whether you will live here in winter. A house for year-round living needs proper heating and insulation around the whole building envelope. A summer house can make do with air conditioners, but it needs ventilation for the months when it stands closed up, otherwise by spring the rooms will smell of damp.

Townhouses and duplexes are built when a plot is shared with relatives or one half is meant to be rented out. Each part has its own entrance and its own services, and we build the shared wall to block sound and hold back fire. A weekend house or garden house is usually small and often unheated, so lightweight construction methods suit it.

A single-storey house is convenient if elderly parents will live in it: no stairs, everything on one level. But per square metre of living space it has more foundation and roof, and it takes up more land. A two-storey house has a smaller footprint, and from the upper floor the sea view more often opens up above the neighbours' roofs.

Guest houses and mini-hotels for rent

The right format for a rental house depends on how you will let it and who will run it. Most tourists come to Batumi between July and September, and in winter short-term occupancy drops, hence the pattern of daily rentals in summer and monthly lets in winter. A house let by the month in winter needs heating in every room and ventilation that runs even when a room is empty.

If you live abroad, it is better to design the guest house from the start to run without the owner: electronic locks, self check-in, separate entrances to the rooms or a shared hall without a reception desk. If the house will later come to us for rental management, show the layout to our rental manager at the concept stage, while changes are still made on paper.

Commercial buildings

For a commercial building, the design depends on the tenant. If you already have one, we fit the layout and services to their requirements. If there is no tenant yet, we plan an open layout: a column grid that works for a shop as well as an office, shop windows on the ground floor and spare electrical capacity.

When there is a shop or cafe downstairs and apartments upstairs, they get different entrances, separate services and a well soundproofed floor between them. Large shop windows weaken the ground floor in an earthquake if heavy floors with solid walls sit above it. The structural engineer calculates and strengthens such a floor separately, and it makes sense to settle this before the facade is sketched.

Outbuildings on the plot

A bathhouse or sauna is the most humid building on the plot. It needs a continuous vapour barrier, extraction and safe clearances between the stove and the walls. A wood-burning stove also needs a chimney with non-combustible fire-stopping around it, and an electric one needs its own circuit from the consumer unit (fuse box).

By the sea we build gazebos and pergolas from aluminium, or from steel with a coating made for sea air. Timber ones are impregnated and set on metal supports raised above the ground. A carport is simpler than a garage and keeps off the sun and rain, while a closed garage in a humid climate needs ventilation, otherwise damp builds up inside. We place an outdoor kitchen with a sink, electrics and often a barbecue so that smoke doesn't drift into the windows of the house or towards the neighbours.

Utility buildings are easy to combine: a store for garden tools, the pump room for the borehole, a place for water filters. It pays to put all these buildings on the site plan together with the house, because services are easier to run to them while the trenches are open. Whether you need a notification or a permit depends on the class of the structure, and we check it for a bathhouse or a garage too.

Villa and guest house construction in Batumi on difficult plots

On a slope, the house is fitted into the terrain: the lower floor is partly set into the ground, the entrance is on the upper side, and the terraces look down towards the sea. Water from the plots higher up runs through yours, so along the upper boundary we dig a cut-off ditch that takes it round the house.

Right by the sea, salt comes first. We choose railings, gate hinges and outdoor air conditioning units with corrosion protection. On low-lying plots near the shore the groundwater can be close to the surface, and after the ground survey it sometimes makes more sense to do without a basement.

A house in the Adjara highlands is possible by separate agreement, since we usually work in Batumi and on the coast. In the mountains access decides everything: concrete, blocks and the crane have to come up a mountain road, so methods built from light elements have the advantage. The structural engineer calculates the roof for the snow and wind at the plot's altitude, and where there are no mains services, we design an independent water supply, wastewater treatment and backup power from the start.

On a narrow plot the house is stretched back from the street, the windows are turned towards the yard, and the upper floor makes up the area that didn't fit on the ground floor. There is no room for storage on such a site, so we bring in materials in batches to a schedule, and during excavation we support and protect the neighbour's wall.

House shape, style and how the build is organised

A flat roof gives you one more terrace, but for the local downpours it needs a fall towards the outlets, two outlets instead of one and an emergency overflow in the parapet. An attic floor costs less than a full upper storey, but under the slope of the roof it gets hot in summer unless the roof is insulated and ventilated. We shade panoramic glazing facing south and west with a canopy or louvres, and the threshold to the terrace gets a drainage channel so that wind-driven rain can't push water into the house.

We design a swimming pool together with the house: on a slope the pool shell becomes a separate structure with its own waterproofing and drainage. The Mediterranean style, with light walls, roof tiles and deep terraces, suits the local climate well. High-tech architecture with large areas of glass and metal needs more attention to corrosion and overheating, while a chalet of wood and stone fits better in the mountains than on the seafront.

Any of these buildings can be ordered turnkey or stage by stage, and built while you stay in another country. Weekly reports, video calls with the foreman and signed acceptance of each stage are the same for a bathhouse and for a mini-hotel.