Shelter: Sacromonte

That the Sacromonte Landscape Hotel even exists in its adopted home is entirely impressive. It took 13 semi-trailers to deliver the hotel’s fully assembled cabins to a vineyard in the hills of Maldonado. Each truck travelled more than 200 kilometres from the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, where the cabins were carefully pre-fabricated. Cranes then lifted the installations onto an existing base of stone and timber hedging, finally settling them into their new home. Sacromonte is part hotel, part winery and all modern luxury. It’s set to open in late 2018 and, while the landscape appears to resemble traditional Tuscany, it’s actually in the verdant southeastern tip of compact Uruguay.

But the genuine originality of this hotel is not limited to its beginnings. The team from MAPA, a Uruguayan and Brazilian-based architectural consultancy, has created a set of individual villas that take design cues from Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in Connecticut. Each cubic cabin features a radical mirrored frontage, an effect designed to mask the appearance of a man-made structure and instead reflect the rugged vegetation of the rolling vineyard surrounds. Grassed roofing blends the cabins into the lush hills, while when viewed from behind, piled timber appears as a tidy stack of chopped firewood. This is a property that goes to great lengths to camouflage itself from view.

From the inside, the mirrored wall becomes floor-to-ceiling glass; the one-way view meaning guests can be immersed in the landscape without sacrificing privacy. The so-called “cabins” are in no way the abode of a traditional winery stay. These are stellar  design structures, boldly radical in their concept and execution, that would be at home in the awards edition of any respected interiors tome. And most likely will be.