Perched above Kapsali bay and the castled chora, the House in Kythera reorganises an awkward, layered plot into a single, gentle composition of three interlinked homes. The brief asked us to retain the 1980s house, to test the nineteenth-century fabric and to add new accommodation for a couple and their three daughters so the development might read both as an estate and as distinct dwellings.
After measured study we kept the 1980s building, removed most of the derelict nineteenth-century volume and grafted a new structure onto its footprint: a deliberate intervention that follows the logic of pruning and regrowth. Borrowing the island’s aktinoti (radial) typology, the design organises life around a central kitchen that becomes the project’s nucleus; rooms and terraces radiate from this core, each carefully oriented to frame specific sea views and to respond to the steep, layered topography.
The scheme negotiates regulatory constraints and the extremes of scale on site by composing a sequence of modest, white volumes and rough local stone walls that step with the land. The result is a balanced architectural organism—collective where it must be, private where it is required—rooted in place and open to the landscape.