Author: fatura

This small coastal house in Nea Skioni, Halkidiki, exists at the friction point between law and desire. Local building regulations demand a unified mass – the legal form of a single holiday home. Yet the family who commissioned the house, an ageing couple with two adult children, no longer fits this normative model. They wanted separation and autonomy, spaces for private life alongside collective gathering. The house answers by complying with the law, while pushing its boundaries by quietly splitting from within. All interior and exterior spaces are inscribed within a 17×17 metre monolithic square. But within this frame, the house breaks apart. An extruded cross organises circulation and fragments the solid into three distinct units, each with its own entrance, its own route to the garden, its own threshold between inside and out. This gesture both connects and separates, allowing for privacy and proximity.

A perimeter wall holds this fragmented life inside, its porosity shifting along the edges – sometimes sealing off, others opening to the landscape. Three courtyards puncture the mass, making space for informal life along the Greek coast – shaded breakfasts, outdoor showers after swimming, cigarettes and dinners under the sky. The holiday home becomes a device that negotiates shifting family structures and expanding desires, hosting forms of life that resist regulation.

Materials remain humble, making a playful reference to the lexicon of vernacular modernist vacation homes of the Greek coast; coarse, lightly-coloured plaster walls, aluminium frames, decorative perforated blocks, shading devices, light-wooden partitions, and a rooftop pergola. Yet colour appears in small, charged moments, highlighting activities such as cooking and bathing, inside and outside the house.

This housing complex stands at the edge of Thessaloniki, on a sloping plot directly below the listed Benouzilio silk mill – a landmark of the city’s industrial archaeology. Built in 1880 as part of a larger ceramic factory, the mill is both a physical and a symbolic anchor. The new complex enters into a productive dialogue with its neighbour, respecting its scale, material memory, and presence, while reinterpreting its language into contemporary housing.

The design consists of three distinct residential volumes, placed along the edges of the plot to frame the mill and open up a shared central courtyard. This configuration creates a collective space, where life unfolds between private thresholds and the cultural memory of the factory above. The buildings follow the natural slope, adapting their heights and profiles to echo the industrial structures nearby, while offering protected views of the city below.

The housing complex borrows from the material history of its listed counterpart utilizing ceramic tiles and mass produced components for windows, apertures, skylights and pergolas. Each building is wrapped in a concrete L-shaped element – a thick, protective line that shields the units and directs life inward and toward the courtyard. Beneath this protective frame, the ceramic cladded volumes break down into smaller, more intimate spaces, generating semi-outdoor terraces and sheltered corners for domestic life to spill outside. Planted roofs and new local species of plants within the courtyard stitch the project into the wider landscape, creating a habitat that is both ecological and social – a contemporary living environment grounded in the layered history of Pylaia.