Project file
Thessaloniki, 2022 — Residential, 240 m². Greek Institute of Architects Domestic Award, 2022.
The brief
A family of four came to us with a steep east-facing slope above Panorama, a platanus they did not want to lose, and a brief of one line: “a quiet kitchen and a place to read.”
The house is organised as three small volumes around the tree — sleeping, living, and a reading room that is barely a room. The slope is held by dry-stone retaining walls built over fourteen weeks with stonemason Petros Argyriou.
Everything was drawn at 1:20 before it was drawn at 1:50: the kitchen wall, the window reveals, the tread of the stair down to the garden.
Materials
Field note, year one
At the twelve-month visit the concrete had darkened where the family walk past it, a hand’s width above the counter. We had drawn the wall for the light; it turned out to be for the hand.
The reading room is used more than the living room. If we drew the house again we would make it a little smaller and the window a little narrower.
