MOGOO GREEN – Residential complex

Twenty‑four houses. One lake. One premise: that architecture can hold a community together the way a forest holds the light – from within.

Mogoo Green occupies 11,700 square meters on the shore of Lake Mogoșoaia, a site embedded in one of Bucharest’s most storied landscapes. The Brâncovenesc Palace nearby has always known something about permanence – about the weight of brick, the patience of the arch, the quiet authority of a façade that does not explain itself. This project listens to that. Carefully.

The approach is not revival. It is reinterpretation. Warm hand‑laid brick wraps the lower volumes in a material that reads as both ancient and entirely present. Above, dark‑framed upper floors cantilever over the street – precise, contemporary, resolute. The tension between these two registers is intentional. Old and new are not competing here. They are in conversation.

The arch – the defining motif of Brâncovenesc architecture – recurs on every façade. Not as ornament, but as structure. Tall arched windows in black steel frame the interior from the street, announcing a space worth entering. Perforated brick screens filter light across facades and garden edges, casting shadows that shift through the day. Wrought‑iron railings carry the ornamental vocabulary of the Palace into the private loggia – where the balcony meets the sky.

The layout of each house is organized around generosity. Ground floors open wide – living and dining in continuous flow, kitchen at scale, a terrace that extends the interior into the garden without negotiation. The staircase is spiral, unhurried. Upper levels distribute private space with precision: bedrooms with dressings, bathrooms with the intention of a private spa, and terraces that face the trees. The largest typology adds a full master suite floor – 25 square meters of bedroom, 22 of dressing, two terraces from which Mogoșoaia’s landscape becomes the fourth wall.

Between the houses, the allée connects rather than divides. Copper‑clad planters anchor the street at intervals. Trees planted in both rows signal that this is a community by design – not by proximity alone.

At the end of the site, the lake.

“First time I visited the site, the sun was setting on the other side of the lake and I felt transported in a very remote place, very serene. I then realized I’m just few kilometers from where I live, in Bucharest. With this in mind, my creative intention was to set the stage for a unique type of house: one that brings together urban comforts and nature feeling. And very important, to link those two pillars in a design‑centric way.” – Alina Vîlcu