Home remodeling — Costa Rica
A tropical house is a light problem before it is a decorating problem.
Interior design and remodeling for homeowners and expats in Costa Rica — from one difficult room to an entire villa. Twenty years in luxury product design, applied to concrete, timber, air and shade.
Villa Pi.Casa — my first project, built from the ground up on the hillside of Santa Teresa.
Approach
Remove before you add
Most houses here were built to keep weather out and ended up keeping the country out with it. My first list is always subtraction: which wall closes the cross-breeze, which ceiling is holding the heat, which window is in the wrong wall. Only then do we talk about finishes.
What follows is a small, controlled palette — polished concrete, local timber, stone, lime plaster, linen — with colour arriving in one or two deliberate places rather than everywhere. The detailing comes from the workshop habits of luxury goods: visible edges resolved, hardware chosen rather than accepted, nothing hidden behind trim.
And it has to survive a Costa Rican year. Salt air, humidity, insects and a rainy season decide what is actually a good material, which is why reclaimed teak and regional stone win over anything imported and fashionable.
Process
Six steps, and you know what happens in each
No surprises is the entire promise. Here is the sequence every project follows, with the honest duration next to it.
Step 01
Walking the house
We spend the first visit doing almost nothing: opening every door, watching where the sun lands at ten and at four, listening for where the noise comes from. Most of what is wrong with a tropical house is a light and airflow problem wearing an aesthetic disguise.
One visit, on site
Step 02
The line drawing
Before any material is chosen you get plans and hand elevations — walls to remove, ceilings to open, where water and light will go. Drawing is cheap and demolition is not, so we argue on paper until the plan is boring and obvious.
2–3 weeks
Step 03
Material board
Real samples, not renderings: the concrete finish, the timber, the stone, the lacquer, the linen, in your own light. Reclaimed and local materials come first — teak from old structures, regional stone, wood recovered from the beach.
1–2 weeks
Step 04
Build, supervised weekly
Local trades I have worked with since Villa Pi.Casa, with me on site every week and reachable on WhatsApp in between. You get photographs each Friday and one honest line about what moved and what did not.
8–20 weeks
Step 05
Decoration and placement
Furniture, lighting, textiles and art placed in person, over several days. Where it suits the house, one of my own sculptures or lamps ends up in it — never as a condition, only when the room asks for it.
1–2 weeks
Step 06
Handover and one-year look
You receive the material list, care notes and every supplier contact. I come back after a year, because tropical climate is the real inspector: this is where we correct what the first rainy season revealed.
Handover + 12 months
Flagship project — Villa Pi.Casa, Santa Teresa
The house I built from the ground up for myself, then kept living in
Started after Covid on an empty hillside plot. Fourteen months of work: high open ceilings from the first drawing, every wall placed for the cross-breeze, polished concrete floors set level with the garden. It is now both my home and the clearest demonstration of the method.
"I made every mistake building Pi.Casa from nothing. My clients get the house those mistakes taught me to build."
Pierre-Yves Labey on Villa Pi.Casa
Scope of work
What I can take on
Full remodeling
Complete houses and villas: demolition planning, layout, ceilings, floors, kitchens, bathrooms, terraces, lighting design, furniture and decoration, with weekly site supervision.
Single rooms
One kitchen, one bathroom, one terrace, or the main living space. Same process, compressed — useful if you want to see how we work together before committing to a whole house.
Interior design only
Drawings, material board, lighting plan, furniture and art selection for a house you are building with your own contractor, including remote support for owners abroad.
Next step
Send me photographs of the room that bothers you.
Three or four pictures and the address is enough for me to say honestly whether I am the right person, what it would involve and roughly how long it takes.
Projects across Costa Rica and the Pacific coast; other regions on request.