Every site arrives with its own argument. On the slopes north of Tehran, that argument is written in contour lines — abrupt, opinionated, unforgiving. We have learned, over the course of several hillside projects, that the most productive response to difficult terrain is not to fight it but to make it the generator of the design itself.

Topography does things for architecture that no amount of compositional ingenuity can manufacture. It creates section — the vertical dimension that flat sites deny. It establishes natural thresholds between levels of a building. It orients views without the architect having to impose a direction. When a site drops eight metres from street to garden, every floor plate becomes a deliberate act, every stair a journey between distinct spatial worlds.

Reading the Land Before Drawing

Our practice begins every hillside project with what we call a site reading — not a survey in the technical sense (though that comes too), but a slower process of walking the land at different hours, noting where the sun lands in the morning and where shadows pool by afternoon, understanding where water moves after rain, identifying the view corridors that will shape the program before a single room is named.

At Sepidar Residences in Lavasan, this reading revealed that the most compelling vantage point was not from the highest point of the site — as intuition might suggest — but from a terrace midway down, where a gap in the mature plane trees framed a precise slice of the Alborz ridgeline. The master suite ended up on that level. The reading dictated the outcome.

Terracing vs. Cutting

There are two dominant strategies for building on slopes. The first is to cut the hill — excavate a flat platform, build a conventional orthogonal volume, and retain the removed earth behind concrete walls. This approach is efficient and cheap. It is also almost always wrong. The cut disrupts drainage, exposes new surfaces to erosion, separates the building from the natural gradient, and leaves the finished project looking like something that landed from elsewhere rather than something that grew from its place.

The second strategy is to terrace — to let the building step with the land, to create floor plates at multiple levels that each engage the ground at a different elevation. This is more complex to engineer and more demanding to detail. But it produces architecture that belongs.

The most honest thing an architect can do on a difficult site is to make the difficulty visible — and beautiful.

Structure as Landscape

When a building terraces down a slope, its retaining elements — the walls that hold the earth back at each level — become part of the architectural language. In our hillside projects, we treat these retaining walls not as necessary evils to be hidden behind cladding but as primary surfaces: board-formed concrete that carries the grain of the timber formwork, local stone that echoes the geology of the hill itself.

The result is architecture that reads differently from above and below. From the street, the building presents a restrained façade — one storey visible above grade. From the garden, the full depth of the section reveals itself: three levels of terraced living space, each opening onto its own outdoor platform, each framing a different portion of the view.

Drainage, Planting, and the Long Game

Hillside buildings that endure do so because their designers thought about water. Rainwater on a slope moves fast and carries soil. A building that ignores this reality will, within a decade, show the evidence: stained concrete, eroded planters, undermined foundations. Our standard approach routes surface water through visible channels — not hidden pipes — so the drainage becomes part of the landscape design. Planted swales slow the water, filter it, and recharge the ground rather than sending it racing to the street.

This is the long game of hillside building: designing not just for the day of completion but for the decade after, when the planting has matured, when the stone walls have taken on the patina of their exposure, when the building has settled into the land as if it could never have been anywhere else.

Restraint is not an aesthetic position. Architects who treat minimalism as a style — who strip buildings of content in order to achieve a photograph — produce spaces that are uncomfortable to inhabit. The objects pile up. The activities resist the blankness. Life, which is inherently messy and particular, refuses to conform to the absence that was designed for it.

The restraint we practice is different. It begins not from an image of what the building should look like but from a question about what work the building needs to do — and then a disciplined refusal to add anything that does not help do that work. The result sometimes looks minimal. More often it just looks right, which is different.

Structure as the Starting Point

Every building project begins with structure, whether the architect acknowledges this or not. A floor plate at a given level creates a horizontal surface that must be supported by something below it and protected from weather above. The decisions that flow from this — column spacing, wall placement, span direction, roof form — are structural decisions before they are aesthetic ones.

Our practice takes seriously the possibility that these structural decisions, made with intelligence and care, can be the architecture. Not infrastructure to be dressed with design, but design itself. When a concrete frame is exposed because the frame is good enough to be seen — when the column spacing has been worked out so that the structural rhythm aligns with the programmatic one — the structure earns its visibility.

The Cost of Addition

Every element added to a building has costs beyond its financial one. It occupies visual attention. It requires maintenance. It makes claims on the spatial composition that may work against other elements. When a façade is cluttered, not every element can be the protagonist — some will inevitably read as noise. The discipline of restraint is partly an act of editing: asking, of every proposed addition, whether it earns its place by improving the whole or whether it is there out of habit, convention, or anxiety.

Anxiety is a significant generator of unnecessary architectural elements. The client who is uncertain whether the building is enough adds a decorative layer. The architect who is uncertain whether the space will read as refined adds a material contrast. These additions rarely resolve the underlying uncertainty. They just decorate it.

Restraint is not about having less. It is about ensuring that what remains is working as hard as it possibly can.

Where Detail Belongs

Restraint at the level of composition does not mean the absence of detail. It means that detail is concentrated at moments that earn it — at the threshold where hand meets door, at the joint where two materials meet, at the point where the eye is drawn and rewarded for its attention. A building can be spatially austere and materially rich at these specific moments without contradiction.

At Nasl House, the decision was made early to keep the envelope simple — white render on a rectilinear volume with a consistent window rhythm — and to invest the budget freed by that simplicity into the quality of the interior materials, the craftsmanship of the joinery, and the landscaping that frames the building from the approach. The result is a building that looks quiet from a distance and reveals itself slowly to those who enter and inhabit it.

This is the economy of restraint: not spending less, but spending more carefully. The money that might have gone into a complex façade system or a decorative canopy goes instead into the quality of the stone floor, the precision of the ceiling detail, the specification of the hardware. Clients who live in buildings like this consistently report that they notice the quality more — not less — than they would have in a more visually busy design, precisely because the restraint creates space for attention.