Project file

Eptapyrgio Apartments

Thessaloniki upper town, 2021 — Adaptive Reuse, six units. Mies van der Rohe Award longlist, 2023.

The brief

A 1928 townhouse on a cobbled street.

Six small apartments inside a listed building on a street too steep for a lorry. Every material arrived by hand or by three-wheeler.

We surveyed for four months before drawing anything — the building is out of plumb in three directions and every one of them matters at the reveals.

What we kept

The stair, the original brick on the south wall, the iron window frames on the courtyard

What we changed

The floors, the plaster, the kitchens, and every reveal

Lime plaster

Domiki, Volos

Oak parquet

Lifted, stripped, relaid

Iron sections

Karagiozoglou, Thessaloniki

Field note

Twenty-two millimetres between the original brick and the new plaster at the top of the stair. We drew it nine times.

It is the detail every visitor stops at, and the one the owner mentions first.