The City of Goats Kozy Brings a Wes Anderson Dream to Rural Moldova

There is a place in Moldova where symmetry meets whimsy, where goats stroll out of pastel cottages that look as though they were lifted straight from the pages of a film script. Just forty minutes outside Chisinau, in the village of Pohrebea, The City of Goats known as Kozy has become one of the most curious cultural experiments in Europe.

The project comes from leading architecture bureau LH47 ARCH and feels like a set that Wes Anderson forgot to claim. Think washed-out yellows, playful greens, precise geometry and a sense of humour stitched into every corner. Unlike the fleeting charm of an Instagram snapshot, Kozy stretches the “Accidentally Wes Anderson” aesthetic into an entire village, a living storyboard where goats are the citizens and humans the passing tourists.

What makes it fascinating is not only the visual appeal but the way design has been grounded in sustainability. The goat houses are not props. They are real dwellings built from straw, clay and lime, finished with salvaged terracotta tiles and wood reclaimed from nearby villages. Every structure feels at once cinematic and rooted in rural tradition, as if the land itself were asked to take part in the performance.

Walking through Kozy reveals a miniature capital with all the civic pride of a functioning town. There is a Town Hall, a police station and a post office. There is a grocery store where visitors feed the residents using the city’s own currency, the Kozy Coin. A tourist office provides orientation while an art gallery stages reimagined classics such as the Kozy Lisa, a Mona Lisa reinterpreted through the lens of goats. Even a tongue-in-cheek casino called the Kozy-no appears on the edge of town, where bets are placed on which goat will deliver the most milk.

The reversal of roles is what lingers most. Goats enjoy chandeliers and bookshelves inside their carefully designed homes, while human visitors take to hillside tents with fridges, showers and views over the village. It is a deliberate inversion of daily life that recasts goats as the full citizens of this imagined utopia and leaves humans as respectful guests.

The experience is as layered as it is surreal. Families find themselves charmed by goat kids in the petting area. Adults unwind with a glass of Moldovan wine in the cellar or sit down for dinner at the restaurant that completes the complex. There is laughter and therapy at work here, a reminder that design can provoke joy as easily as awe. At any moment a goat may wander up and rest its head in your lap, an unscripted performance in a world that otherwise feels carefully staged.

Kozy has also become a quiet force for social change. What started with just two workers has grown into steady employment for dozens of locals from Pohrebea and the surrounding villages. Within weeks of opening it was hailed as one of Moldova’s most inventive tourist attractions and interest has already spread to Spain, Romania, Poland and Georgia where conversations are under way about replicating the idea.

For Serghei Mirza, founder of LH47 ARCH and cofounder of Kozy, the project is about more than novelty. “We combined goat therapy with architecture. This is neither a zoo nor a farm. It is a place where people step into the lives of animals. When roles are reversed like this our ideas about what architecture can do change completely.”

The City of Goats Kozy is at once playful and profound. It is a village that borrows from nostalgia yet feels entirely new, a real-life tableau that could have been framed through Anderson’s lens. It stands as both tourist attraction and architectural provocation, suggesting that the line between fiction and reality is not as rigid as we think. For those willing to travel into rural Moldova, it offers the rare chance to walk into a dream and discover that the dream walks right back towards you on four legs.

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Credits

Project team: Serghei Mirza, Nikolai Grozdev, Vladislav Petrika, Maria Shova, Vadim Fonariuc, Alexandrina Postolachi

Project status: Completed

Location: Pohrebea village, Moldova

Total site area: 3,000 sq m

Photos by George Omen