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.