The first thing the house does is stop you. Not with scale, though there is plenty of it further in, but with a courtyard set just past the front door, wrapped in glass, & planted with bamboo. Instead of moving straight to the main living spaces, you’re held for a moment in the middle of a house you haven’t yet seen, light falling vertically, bamboo moving behind the glass. It’s the first of many such moments. At Moments Villas, no room was designed simply to be passed through, each one was built as its own small arrival.
That idea, and the calm it creates, is what earned Moments Villas, developed by Canaan Developers, most recent distinction. In 2024, the project was named Best Residential Interior Show Home Africa at the International Property Awards, an honour given specifically for its interiors.
For Canaan Developers Limited, one of East Africa’s top real estate developers, and the design team at Lehem Interiors, the name Moments was never just a label for the development, it became the design philosophy itself. “The name Moments played a big part in our design philosophy,” says Ace Oreal, Chief Creative Director at Lehem Interiors. “The house was envisioned to host special features in every space. All these experiences create unforgettable moments.”
It’s an approach that reflects a broader shift in residential design, and in how wellness itself is designed for. A home is no longer judged only on bedrooms or square footage; increasingly, the more interesting question is how it supports connection and well-being, with nature and with the people in it. At Moments, that shows up as light, greenery and quiet built into the plan rather than added to it; an enclave designed to slow a person down as much as to shelter them.
Located on Mzima Springs Road in Lavington, the development comprises four homes, each approximately 5,000 square feet, on a single one-acre plot. The decision to build only four was deliberate. “Moments was created for the modern luxury buyer’s need to retreat after a long day and enjoy a moment of quietness, while still staying close to family life and the depth of nature. What they wanted was space that does nothing but make the house better to live in,” says Yohannes Kidane, Head of Business at Canaan Developers.
That philosophy extended into the interiors themselves. Rather than treating design as a finishing touch, Canaan folded it into the development process from the start, with Lehem Interiors working alongside the architectural drawings so that privacy, movement and everyday routines were built into the home rather than layered on later. Wellness, in this sense, was never a separate feature, it was part of the architecture from the first drawing. “The team at Canaan Developers made it clear they were looking for a house that supports how residents connect with each other and with everything around them,” says Oreal. “Our thinking with Moments was focused on what each space should feel like to walk into, and putting the villa together as a sum of those answers.”
The relationship between the interiors and their surroundings is one of Moments’ defining characteristics. “This project is born from the dialogue between nature and architecture,” says Oreal. “That gives Moments its soul.” The entrance courtyard is the first expression of that dialogue, but every wing has its own version: the guest wing opens onto its own private garden, and the master suite is served by a screened balcony large enough for an outdoor massage table, a private wellness space to arrive into at the end of the day, not just to sleep in.
Kenya real estate market shows resilience as investors shift focus to quality
These aren’t amenities added to pad a features list; they pull light, greenery and moments of retreat deeper into the plan, taking advantage of a climate that lets indoor and outdoor living overlap for most of the year. “If you actually think about it, how many countries are lucky enough to have perfect year-round weather?” Kidane asks. “Isn’t it time our architecture allows us to truly experience Kenya the way it should be experienced?”
At Moments, courtyards, terraces and gardens become part of the home’s daily rhythm. The outdoors isn’t something residents leave the house to find; it reappears as they move through it. That same attention extends to the kitchen. Open-plan living has become one of the defining trends in residential design, bringing cooking, dining and entertaining into one space, but for households that entertain often, cater at home and rely on domestic staff, a single kitchen can quickly become both a social space and a service corridor.
In Moments Villas, the kitchen is split in two: a display kitchen built for interaction, with an island bar and breakfast nook opening onto its own small courtyard, and a second kitchen behind it, connected to the scullery, laundry and staff quarters. One space is about being seen; the other is about making the house work. On one hand guests gather at the island while on the other preparation and household operations happen out of sight.
It’s a simple intervention, but one that reveals the project’s thinking, luxury isn’t about adding more to a room. Sometimes it’s about removing what interrupts how the room is meant to be used. The same thinking shapes the villa’s approach to scale. Nairobi’s luxury market has often used height as a visual shorthand for value like imposing entrances and double-height living areas. At Moments, verticality is used selectively, with the interiors emphasising proportion and horizontal movement instead. “In this project, we wanted to emphasise the horizontal lines,” says Oreal. “That’s related to luxury. Luxurious houses are horizontal, not vertical.” The approach doesn’t eliminate verticality altogether; it uses contrast deliberately. “At the same time, to emphasise those lines, we wanted to create a contrast with the vertical lines in the facade. It gives the right balance and attraction.”
The main living space extends across two storeys, opening through full-height sliding doors onto a garden terrace. A marble fireplace rises through the full height of the room, one of the few deliberate vertical moments in an otherwise expansive, grounded composition.
Elsewhere, the interiors lean away from the traditional feature wall; with more walls in glass, views and natural light become part of the room’s visual language, and furniture, sculpture and planting can be read from multiple angles. The same logic separates different kinds of living: the television moves into a dedicated theatre, leaving the main room organised around conversation, the garden, glass and the fireplace. Doors, lighting and curtains are controlled from a phone rather than a wall of switches.
Service areas follow their own route, so household operations never cut through entertaining spaces, a place for gathering, for retreat, for entertaining, and for the house simply to run, without any of it constantly colliding. For Canaan Developers, this is where interior design and functionality meet as one consideration of how a home should be experienced. “The best ingredient in making or designing a house is emotion,” says Kidane. “If you’re doing things with love, I think it will lead you to something that is positive as well.”
The villa’s interiors don’t depend on a single grand reveal. Instead, they create a sequence of smaller discoveries: the courtyard just beyond the entrance, bamboo behind glass, the transition from kitchen to garden, the length of the living room, a terrace door sliding open, the privacy of the master courtyard. “We designed for a series of small arrivals rather than one grand reveal,” Oreal says. “Do it without emotion and all you have specified is square meters. We created different moments across the whole house.”
It’s this attention to detail, the wellness built into every threshold, the nature threaded through every room, that the International Property Awards recognised in 2024, naming Moments Villas Best Residential Interior Show Home Africa. It reflects well, too, on Canaan Developers, one of East Africa’s top real estate developers, whose decision to fold interior design into the build from the outset helped produce a home judged as much for how it feels as for how it looks.
“We are looking beyond the dramatic size that any developer can build, into the extraordinary moments the villa can give throughout the day,” Kidane says. “You get to enjoy light falling into the middle of the house at 11am, bamboo behind glass, a terrace door pushed open on a warm evening, and settled ways to enjoy your home.”
Perhaps that’s the more interesting measure of luxury at Moments, not simply how much house you have, but how many ways it gives you to experience it, and, as its 2024 award confirms, how deliberately every one of those moments was designed.
