For design
La Maison Bleue
El Gouna · Egypt
La Maison Bleue is a fiction you can sleep in: a pale-blue villa on a Red Sea lagoon, built as the imagined mansion of a nineteenth-century Levantine merchant who collected the whole Mediterranean and carried it home.
The house stands a little apart at the northern end of El Gouna, long and pale-blue against its own lagoon, the sea a short walk beyond the gardens. Everything about it argues for the story it tells. Venetian shutters and coffered ceilings meet Syrian arches, Cretan murals, Catalan mosaics and North African lanterns, assembled with the confidence of a collector rather than the caution of a decorator. There are thirteen suites and no children, which keeps the mood closer to a private home than a resort. Antiques, paintings and a great deal of blue fill the rooms, and a marble staircase climbs past frescoed walls to the first floor. It should feel like a stage set, and somehow it does not.
The kitchen is in the hands of the French chef Vincent Guillou, who cooks from the market and the garden and lets Egypt and Europe share the plate. Dinner is the evening's centre here, unhurried, candlelit and close to the water. Relais & Châteaux counts the house among its own and the Michelin Guide lists it, which tells you the ambition is real and not only decorative.
El Gouna can read as a developer's town, tidy and invented, and La Maison Bleue is invented too. The difference is that it commits. The blue villa takes a single idea, a merchant's magpie house on the Red Sea, and follows it into every room and every tile without once winking at you. It is small, adults-only and quietly grand, with a heated pool, a spa and a stretch of private lagoon for the hours between meals. On a coast built mostly for volume, a thirteen-suite house that chooses restraint is worth the detour.
