The house that came out of its own hill
Nikola Bašić drew Villa Nai 3.3 along the contour lines of an olive grove above Žman, and the family that owns it built the walls from the rock they took out of the ground.
From the track above Žman there is very little to look at. Olives, and a drystone wall following the slope down to the water. Eight rooms, two restaurants, a spa and a working olive mill are somewhere in front of you, and none of it announces itself. Forbes, visiting in the first season, put it in four words: it’s invisible from behind.
That is not a marketing line. It is the plan.
The architect
Nikola Bašić was born on Murter in 1946 and is a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Most people who know his work do not know his name. He is the author of the Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun on the Zadar waterfront — two pieces that people sit on every evening without asking who made them. He works under his own name; there is no studio.
The commission came from Nives and Goran Morović, who grow olives at Žman. Goran is a civil engineer, and the family’s own construction company built the hotel. That matters more than it sounds: a building this awkward to make is not something a general contractor bids on cheerfully.
Reading the contour
Most hillside hotels begin by making a flat place. This one begins by refusing to. The plan follows the isohypses — the contour lines of the slope — so the building bends where the ground bends, and the planted roof continues the grove across the top of it. Rooms start at about 70 m², suites at about 90.
The seaward face is glass: frameless Swiss sliders running floor to ceiling. The face in the hill is blind. Daylight arrives from one side and one side only, which is a constraint most architects would fight and this one clearly enjoyed. The building holds an A+ energy rating; a hillside is a serious insulator.
One thing is worth saying plainly, because the press material does not. Nobody has published the numbers — not the built area, not the depth of the cut, not how much of the volume sits below grade. The building is described everywhere and measured nowhere.
The stone
Stone came out of the hill to make room for the building and then went back into it. The excavated rock was crushed into the concrete; stone cleared from the grove was laid up as facing. Very little of the material arrived by ferry.
The reference is suhozid — the mortarless dry-stone walling that terraced these islands. Villa Nai borrows its look and its logic: horizontal courses and no visible binder, walls that read as accumulation rather than construction. It is not actually a drystone building, and the careful sources say “draws on” rather than “is”. The distinction survives about one retelling.
The long-run average number of snow days a year on Dugi otok. Nai is snow in Dalmatian, the Romance language whose last speaker died on Krk in 1898. Snow kills the pests, and the years it falls give a better crop. The oil is named after the snow. The hotel is named after the oil, not the other way round.
The grove
Four hectares. Something over a thousand trees here — the family counts 1,300 across all its land and 1,100 at Žman — of mixed age, and this is where the reporting goes loose. You will read a hundred years, five hundred, or a thousand, depending on which outlet you picked up.
The one figure anyone can produce a document for is 1607: the year the family’s olive growing at Žman first appears in the written record. Everything older than that is estimate. Two varieties are bottled on their own — Coratina, a Puglian variety high in polyphenols, and Drobnica, native to this coast and small-fruited. The third bottle is a blend.
The mill
The mill is not in an outbuilding. It sits under the same green roof as the rooms, which is the most interesting decision in the project and the one that explains the rest of it. This is a farm with a hotel in it.
Picking starts in early October, when the fruit begins to turn. It is done by hand, and everything goes into the press the same day it comes off the tree. That gap — between picking and milling — is what separates good oil from oil that wins things, and Nai 3.3 wins a great many things. In 2024 alone the family counted twenty-two international awards.
The tables
Two restaurants. The fine-dining room is called 3.3, after the snow, like everything else here. The other is Grotta 11000 — cut into the rock, most of the food cooked over live fire in stone ovens. The number refers to a Dalmatian who lived in caves on this island eleven thousand years ago, which is the sort of name a restaurant either earns or does not. Gault&Millau gave Grotta 16 out of 20 in its 2026 Croatian guide, and Falstaff 89 points the same year.
The record, precisely
Villa Nai 3.3 won the BIG SEE Tourism Design Award in 2023. In 2025 it received three Michelin Keys, the only hotel in Croatia to hold three. In the same year it was one of five hotels shortlisted worldwide for Michelin’s first Architecture & Design Award, and the only European one on the list.
It did not win that award. Atlantis The Royal in Dubai did. The shortlisting is repeated often enough as a win that the correction is worth putting in writing.
The building was designed to disappear into a hill. That is a strange ambition for a hotel and an entirely sensible one for a farm.
Eight rooms will never be a business the way a hotel is a business. It is closer to what the grove is — a long position, taken by people who expect to be here for the next harvest and the one after it.
Whether the architecture is worth the ferry is a question the photographs answer better than I can. What is worth saying is that somebody thought about this for a long time before anyone poured concrete, and on this coast that is rarer than the snow.
