Luxury Hideaway | New Home Design for 7B!
New Hires in Design, Finance, and Client Service!
Architecture Insights | Light and Design in Senderos
We ? Tama | 24 Favorite Tamarindo Restaurants
Luxury Hideaway | New Home Deisgn For 7B!
Thrilled to be able to share a new home design for 7B today! Imagined by Costa Rican WR Architects, the creators of homes 2B and 15B, this 4-bedroom, 3.5 bath home epitomizes their minimalist modern beach style to offer a perfect full-time or part-time family home.
From Hollywood Hills to the Tamarindo Mountainside
Drawing inspiration from sleek, stylish, and yet decidedly organic modern homes, the 4 bedroom layout of Luxury Hideaway provides a number of shared living spaces that allow an effortless flow between indoors and outdoors at the heart of the home.
The detached fourth bedroom by the pool is an absolutely unique touch that really draws out a different dimension for this home, and can work as a bedroom, gym and spa, or entertainment room. Here, it is set up as a full 2nd master suite!
Learn More About Luxury Hideaway
Set on 1600 sqm, with 320 sqm of living space, this 4 bedroom, 3.5 bathroom family concept home is currently listed at $1,100,000 and is permit ready on a coveted corner lot in the heart of Senderos.
If you’d like to learn more, you can reach out to our team at info@senderos-cr.com, but be warned that this Luxury Hideaway will likely not be available for long!
New Hires In Design, Finance, and Client Service!
Senderos wouldn’t be the wonderful place it is without a great team all working together. Just in the process of designing and building your dream home, you’ll work directly or indirectly with our concierge, sales team, project managers, engineers, architects, and construction team.
But even that list doesn’t quite capture the many people who make Senderos what it is. For example, this month we’re thrilled to welcome three new members of the Senderos team in design, finance, and customer advocacy!
The Many Pieces of A Better Senderos
This month we’ve welcomed three excellent new members to the Senderos team — Jenny Hardtmann, our new Financial Controller, Luis Corrales, our new Graphic Designer, and Gioconda “Yoko” Zuñiga, our new Customer Advocate.
Jenny Hardtmann | Financial Controller
Jenny is a Venezuela native, fluent in 4 languages, and brings over 30 years of experience in the luxury hospitality & finance field, including 21 years in senior management positions onboard worldwide luxury five- and six-star cruises (Norwegian, Celebrity among other fleets), ending as the Chief Financial Controller for Sir Richard Branson’s new cruise line, Virgin Voyages.
Jenny established a permanent residency in Costa Rica 6 years ago, and after another stint out among the waves has decided to make Tamarindo her next home as a part of the Senderos team!
“I’m very happy to settle back onto ‘dry’ land here in Tamarindo, where I can embrace my love for the sea, meet people from around the world, and live in a vibrant and multicultural environment, but also have something like a ‘normal’ life. Like riding a bike to work!
I’m extremely excited to have joined Senderos, and I can’t wait to put all of my knowledge and experience in Finance and Customer Experience into helping people build dream homes, and start their best life in this wonderful town of Tamarindo!”
In her spare time, Jenny loves spending time with her family, catching stunning sunrises and sunsets over the ocean, and training her 2 dogs in Dog Agility, Flyball, and Disc.
Luis Corrales | Graphic Designer
Luis is a Guanacaste native originally from Liberia but raised in Cañas, where he developed a passion for graphic design that has followed him throughout his life.
After starting as a diagrammer for a printing company at the age of 17, Luis became an arts teacher and a freelance designer throughout his early 20s, and then eventually became an entrepreneur and business owner for more than 9 years.
In 2014, Luis began to specialize in graphic design for marketing and sales, plying his trade for numerous companies and clients around the country before finally making his way to Tamarindo, where he’s excited to take the next step with Senderos (which started with the graphics in this article!)
“I’m very excited for this opportunity. One of the greatest joys of graphic design is the ability to collaborate with other people, and I can’t wait to share all of my experience with the team at Senderos.
It’s an exciting challenge, especially trying to capture the beauty and adventure of a town like Tamarindo and a place like Senderos, but I’m ready to tackle it head-on!”
In his spare time, you can often find Luis out tearing up the trails on his mountain bike. In his own words, he has two favorite things to do — climb big mountains and go down them as fast as he can.
Gioconda “Yoko” Zuñiga | Customer Advocate
Gioconda, or “Yoko” as she’s known by most friends, joins the team after more than 18 years in Guanacaste, where her incredible wealth of experience in project management and development has given her no small part in shaping the region that we know today!
Yoko’s role as Customer Advocate is central to what makes buying and building in Senderos a totally different experience. The moment you become a client in Senderos, a Customer Advocate is assigned to you. They stay with you throughout the entire process from closing, through design, all the way through construction of your home.
Yoko’s entire job is to make the process transparent and stress-free. She will tell you after managing countless sales and builds, “Yes, building can be complicated, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it inspiring and maybe even a pleasure!”
Even after 18 years in the area, there’s always something new to discover and be a part of, as Yoko explains:
“Life drives you in different ways. I’m excited because Senderos brings me the option to contribute with some of my knowledge, but even more so to have the opportunity to continue growing and learning. There’s an excellent team here, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it!”
Married and the mother of two, Yoko and her family love the outdoors, and on most weekends can be found out and about searching for another adventure together.
More to Come from Senderos!
It’s a real treat to be able to welcome Jenny, Luis, and Yoko to this growing team, especially as Senderos itself continues to hum along, with new homes, homesites, and designs on the horizon alongside new updates for phase 1 and phase 2 to come.
Things are moving quickly here, so if you’d like to see what the buzz is about, you can reach out to our team at info@senderos-cr.com.
Architecture Insights | Light and Design in Senderos
Light has many purposes within a home. It can illuminate a room, it can help navigate. It can provide color and art, and set an emotion.
It can be a powerful asset, like the beautiful light of the sunsets around here, and at the same time, it can be a factor to manage, whether that’s providing shade from the sun or offering a quiet, darker place for sleeping and privacy.
For this article, we sat down with Managing Partner Curtis Peart to discuss the importance of light in Senderos homes.
A Connection to Nature Through Light
One of the most important functions of light in Senderos homes, and in homes throughout Costa Rica, is to provide a connection to nature.
“We have so much natural beauty in Costa Rica, and especially in Guanacaste, which is why there’s such an emphasis on indoor-outdoor living. Inviting natural light that ebbs and flows throughout the day is yet another way to stay connected to that vibrant natural world.”
That natural light factors heavily into the design of Senderos homes, where it’s considered of the utmost importance to have natural light everywhere throughout the home.
Most often, people think about large sunset-facing vistas when they think of natural light in a Guanacaste home, but it’s equally important to draw natural light into smaller, interior, and private spaces.
And as Peart explains, sometimes that takes some creativity from the architect. On more vertical view lots, which are common in Senderos, it’s simple to add natural light to view-facing rooms.
But what about interior spaces that might otherwise face the ground? In fact, there are a number of techniques that can not only improve the lighting of the home but add texture and diversity to the design.
Open treads, transom lights, interior gardens, solar tubes, and even interior windows that look out into the rest of the home can all help solve this natural lighting puzzle. And why is it so important?
“When you’re in a space that has no natural light you can just feel it. It’s artificial, it’s intuitively uncomfortable, and it can even feel disorienting. And that’s never something you want in a beautiful home that’s connected to nature.”
Planning For Light in a Home
The Solar and Wind Orientation Study
Considerations of light within a home start with a solar and wind orientation study, in which architects will consider the location and angles of sunrise and sunset from summer to winter solstice throughout the year (along with wind factors).
As Costa Rica is a tropical country very close to the equator, these angles don’t change as much as they might in a more polar location, but this solar orientation study also considers terrain and landscape.
The result is an in-depth understanding of the home and how light will hit it from each side throughout the day.
Key Considerations: Can There Be Too Much or Too Little?
As we mentioned above, the fundamental principle of light in Costa Rica is to ensure that natural light reaches every room of the house. So any design that fails this criteria certainly has too little natural light.
But can there be too much natural light?
“Theoretically, you could have a home that’s made too bright by inviting direct, midday sun into the home, but we don’t see this very much — if at all — in Costa Rica for the simple reason that designers first consider how the sun affects the heat management of the home.”
When considering heat management, designers take great care to protect the inside of a home from direct sunlight (and its radiant heat) during the middle of the day, which naturally mitigates the possibility of having ‘too much light’. [Read more about Heat Management in Senderos]
The one place where designers do consider mitigating light is in private spaces like bedrooms. For homeowners that prefer the ability to blackout a bedroom or other private space, this naturally requires more coverage by blinds.
The Cutting Edge | The Nuts and Bolts of Lighting
As Peart explains, once natural light enters a room, it bounces around and fills a space quite easily, so there’s not much more to do for the designer.
However, there are a few tools and upgrades that a designer can use to either change the amount and effect of the light as it enters a room.
One place that technology comes into play in a big way in Senderos is through the quality of glass, particularly in homes with large windows (a feature of many Senderos homes).
“You have a bit of a trade-off with large windows because you want to invite the full spectrum of color and light, but you don’t want that strong UV and radiant heat presence.
For a long time, that was a tradeoff you couldn’t get around — you either tinted windows to protect inside, or you dealt with huge heat sinks and UV washout on all your paint and furniture.
Now, as we talked about with heat, there are ways to avoid direct sunlight through design. But from a technological perspective, with the new, high-end glass you can prevent just UV and radiant heat from getting through, while still allowing the full visual spectrum.”
The result? A beautiful and naturally lit home with a cool, longer-lasting interior.
What About Artificial Light?
While the emphasis is certainly on natural light in Senderos, artificial light is crucial to evening hours. Here, builders focus on maintaining warm, comforting light that mimics natural light as much as possible.
“In the days of incandescent lights, you had a warm glow, because you were actually heating a filament. Nowadays, LEDs are the standard due to their efficiency and durability, but in the beginning you had a harsh blue light rather than a welcoming, warm light.
But new generation LEDs have a wide range of colors that are much warmer, and we tend to use these wherever possible, though obviously it’s the choice of the homeowner which color and lighting style they prefer.”
See Them For Yourself
You can see each of the many ways that Senderos homes make use of light throughout the many homes of the project.
Whether through the expansive open spaces and beautiful glass of 5-Bedroom Gem with a 5 Star View and Ocean View Aerie, to the bright living spaces and interior garden space of Magnificent Ocean Views, lighting is a detail that is never overlooked in town.
If you’d like to come see for yourself, and experience the beauty and connection to nature that so many of us have fallen in love with, you can reach out to us at info@senderos-cr.com.
And thank you to Curtis for taking the time to sit down with us!
We ? Tama | 24 Favorite Tamarindo Restaurants
When it comes to Guanacaste dining, you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere that tops Tamarindo. From fresh pipa fría savored right on the beach to elegant dinners served in the open air and everything in between, there’s a little something for everyone to find around Playa Tamarindo.
And for this month’s edition of We ? Tama, you don’t have to look any further than Blue Water Properties Owner Becky Clower’s Tamarindo Restaurant Guide, which highlights 24 favorites including breakfast and brunch, midday favorites, excellent evening fare, and a number of vegan and vegetarian options.
You can click the link above to see her recommendations, and if you have any questions — like the best times to go, how close they are to Senderos, or anything else that comes to mind — you can reach out to us at info@senderos-cr.com.
