1000 Sunny

A three-level house at the highest point above Tamarindo, organised around Pacific views across the bay, with interiors designed in direct dialogue with the owner's art and custom furniture and lighting produced for each space.

1000 Sunny sits at the summit of the hill above Tamarindo — the highest point, and the one with the clearest unobstructed views across the bay. The house is arranged across three levels of intersecting volumes: sleeping on the lower and upper levels, with living at the intermediate level, where the cantilevered living room opens fully toward Playa Grande Bay and the Pacific horizon beyond. The centrepiece of the home is a large outdoor terrace with a lap pool set at the ridge's edge — an infinity of water and sky from which to watch the ever-changing Pacific sunset, uninterrupted in every direction.

Inverse worked in close collaboration with both owners on the architecture and interiors. One half of the couple is a painter, and her artistic sensibility shaped much of the interior character — though the home is a shared vision, carefully and lovingly considered together. Her own paintings hang throughout, and the approach to colour and surface is bold and uninhibited: bathrooms, kitchen, and living spaces each carry their own palette, with collage-like juxtapositions of materials and textures that feel both playful and deliberate. No two spaces are the same — every room has been individually curated, its own distinct composition of colour, finish, and object. Many of the material selections come directly from the owners' travels, drawing ideas from around the world into something that feels entirely singular. Custom furniture, lighting, and decorative pieces were designed in collaboration with Inverse Project. Ultimately the home feels part art gallery, part personal archive — and entirely itself.

The home is composed of a series of stacked architectural masses placed carefully on the descending site to create ideal locations for living and sleeping while capturing the best views possible. The middle level cantilevers northward into a dramatic all-glass living room. The home is entered from a roundabout at the summit of the hill, through a sliding teak entry gate set into the perimeter wall — beside which a corten steel panel, designed by the owner, carries the house name and a friendly owl graphic cut from the same weathered steel. From there a slightly descending stairway flanked by garden planters leads to a large offset pivot door of weathered corten steel set within board-formed concrete entry walls.

Multiple planters on the balconies at each level carry vegetation across the facades of the house, creating a green connection with the hillside beyond and softening the architecture against the tropical landscape. Interior floors are polished concrete throughout, and ceilings are timber — warm, natural materials that provide a quiet backdrop for the owner's collection and for the light that shifts across the surfaces as the sun moves around the hilltop location. Other volumes are clad in natural Costa Rican Blue Marble and volcanic Piedra Sanchez stone. Windows are protected by horizontally sliding louvre screens that can be calibrated for shade or openness. Completed 2026.