Umama’s Nest

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

Umama’s Nest is a wellness sanctuary for women and children designed around the relationship between mothers and daughters, healing and heritage, memory and place.

Located on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, the project draws from the region’s Afro-Caribbean identity, tropical landscape, and open architectural traditions while weaving in the emotional language of the Black American South connected to the owner’s ancestry.

DSGNX approached the project as a cultural bridge across the African diaspora. The architecture merges the openness and ecological intimacy of Caribbean Costa Rican design with the warmth, spirituality, and communal traditions found within Black Southern culture in the United States.

Throughout the project, spaces for wellness, ceremony, and reflection are embedded into the landscape. Healing chalets, yoga environments, garden pathways, communal gathering spaces, and a stained-glass meditation dome create moments of sanctuary across the site. Filtered light, handcrafted textures, tropical vegetation, fresco-inspired surfaces, and shaded courtyards contribute to an atmosphere that feels both grounded in Costa Rica and emotionally connected to diasporic memory.

Rather than separating architecture from culture, Umama’s Nest treats architecture as a vessel for cultural continuity. A place where women and children can reconnect with themselves, with nature, and with generations of inherited identity carried across borders and histories.