Villa construction in Batumi: spans, glass and building services

How a villa differs from a large house on site

Villa construction in Batumi goes through the same stages as any other house, but there are noticeably more decisions to take before the concrete is poured. A living room without columns, a glass wall facing the sea, a cantilevered terrace, a lift, a pool and a plant room for a dozen systems: each of them changes the frame, the floor heights and the routes of the services.

That is why on a villa work on the interior starts earlier than usual. The interior designer works in parallel with the architect, and by the time the structural engineer draws up the working drawings, it is already clear where the sliding glass doors, the kitchen island and the built-in furniture will go and where the risers will run. How an interior design project for a house or villa is put together is covered separately; here we look at what carries over from it into the build.

Column-free spans and a stiff frame

A living room spanning 8–10 metres without supports is possible in a seismic zone, but you pay for it in deeper beams and more reinforcement. A span like this is usually covered by a cast-in-place slab with beams projecting below it, or by a ribbed slab. If the span is larger still or the floor needs to be lighter, the structural engineer may propose steel beams within the concrete frame. Where steel makes sense and where it doesn't is covered in the comparison of concrete vs a steel frame.

Columns taken out of the living room don't disappear from the calculation: something still has to take the seismic load. On a villa this job usually falls to the cast-in-place concrete walls of the staircase and the lift shaft, and sometimes to solid sections of the external walls. They work as a stiffening core, while the glass and the lightweight partitions remain infill. We fix the position of these walls at the sketch stage, because later the core can't be moved to suit the layout.

Terrace cantilevers, canopies and the beams over wide door openings are also built only to calculation, and a villa has more of these details than an ordinary house. How we deal with the reach of a cantilever, the thermal bridge and the deflection of the lintel over a sliding system is covered on the page about a house with a terrace and panoramic glazing.

Floor heights: ceilings with room for the services

Above a villa's ceilings run the ventilation ducts, ducted air conditioners with their condensate drains, and the cable routes. To keep a full-height ceiling beneath all of this, we work out the floor height from the services rather than from the usual figures. In corridors and over walk-in wardrobes we drop the ceiling to box in the ducts, while the living room and bedrooms keep the full height. Recesses for motorised curtains, concealed lighting and ventilation grilles are marked on the sections before the pour.

Every extra 20–30 cm per floor makes the house taller, the staircase longer and the facade more expensive. The overall height of the building is limited by the zoning rules, so we check the floor heights and the levels of the roof and parapet against them at the sketch stage.

A lift, or space reserved for one

In a villa on three levels, especially on a slope where you come in at the top and the bedrooms are below, we plan for a lift in the design even if it won't be installed now. Reserving the space costs less than cutting through finished floor slabs later. On every floor we leave storerooms of the same size, stacked one above another, reinforce the slabs above them for a future opening, and close the opening itself with a light floor that is easy to take out later. At the bottom we form a pit, and we run a separate circuit to where the lift's control panel will go.

A private house usually gets a compact home lift or a platform lift with 2–3 stops, a shallow pit and little headroom at the top of the shaft, and sometimes a glass shaft outside, at the edge of the terrace. We choose the model to fit the shaft, and only one with service in Georgia. Whether the lift affects the class of the structure and the contents of the design package, we check with the architect and our partner lawyer before the documents are submitted.

Building services: air, climate control and power

In winter a large house glazed towards the sea stands with its windows shut, and in summer its air conditioners are running, so we install supply and extract ventilation with heat recovery. Cooling is more often ducted or VRF (multi-zone), with the units in the ceilings, for which we have already left the height. The heating, gas or a heat pump, is chosen before the plant room is laid out. Gas is connected to the house by the gas utility; we don't touch the gas pipe.

A villa's heat pump, air conditioners, pool pumps and kitchen all run at the same time, so we find out what incoming power the grid company will provide before the electrical design. Backup power is also easier to plan now: a spot for a generator outdoors, where the exhaust won't drift into the windows, a cable from it to the consumer unit, a changeover switch and a separate group of circuits that run off the generator. If there is going to be a pool on the plot, we draw its pipework and plant room together with the house; there is more on this on the page about a pool in the design of a house.

Security and low-voltage systems

We design a villa's security together with the electrics, because almost all of it depends on cables laid before plastering. Around the perimeter this means the gate motor, a video intercom at the pedestrian gate and cameras at the entrance and in the corners of the plot. Inside the house come sensors on the ground-floor doors and windows and an alarm that can be connected to a security company's monitoring centre. The router, the camera recorder and the controllers get a cabinet in a dry place, away from the pool plant room: chlorine fumes damage electronics.

If the villa is going to be let, cameras go outside only, and at the design stage we show the plan of cameras, locks and the keypad gate to the manager responsible for villa and guest management. That way, no new cables have to be run through the finished surfaces later. Before the finishing we also fit leak sensors and a motorised shut-off valve on the water inlet: in a house that stands empty in winter, they cut off the water before it reaches the parquet.

Premium finishes in a new build

A new house holds a lot of water in its screed and plaster, and Batumi's humid air dries them slowly. We don't bring in parquet, engineered boards or made-to-measure furniture until the moisture in the substrate has dropped to the manufacturer's limit: we measure it with a meter and record it in a certificate. At this stage dehumidifiers and ventilation run non-stop, otherwise the boards will warp after handover.

Sanitary ware, light fittings and large-format porcelain tiles are ordered from the design project's materials list while the frame is going up, so by the finishing stage they are already waiting in the supplier's warehouse. Large slabs, glass balustrades and the panels of the sliding doors are lifted in by crane before the plot is taken up by paths and lawn, so their delivery belongs in the construction schedule, not the finishing schedule.

The cost of villa construction in Batumi

A turnkey villa costs from 3,030 to 3,960 ₾ per m². This price covers the shell, premium finishes, extensive glazing, terraces and full building services. The pool, the lift and the landscaping are not included and are priced separately: a turnkey 8×4 m concrete pool from 75,000 ₾, a lift with 2–3 stops, installed, from 72,000 ₾, and landscaping from 89 ₾ per m² of plot. The architectural design and the interior design project are also separate lines, with the interior design from 120 ₾ per m².

The price is driven most by the area of glass (a lift-and-slide door costs from 1,800 ₾ per m²), long cantilevers, a slope with retaining walls, a ventilated facade and natural stone. It is lower for a simple volume with an ordinary column grid and standard windows in the bedrooms. An ordinary premium-level house starts from 2,700 ₾ per m²; the difference with a villa comes from the glass, the spans and the services. We send a preliminary estimate based on photos of the plot and a sketch within 24 hours on business days, and the final cost is set on the basis of the design, after a visit to the plot and once the estimate is agreed.