Location: Ekali, Athens, Greece. Year: 2010 Photos: H. Louizidis Description: This single-family house is located in Ekali, a suburban area of Athens. The property is surrounded by high pine trees that shade the lot, which let to the decision to create a continuous openable glass envelope around the south and east sides of the ground floor.
The sliding glass walls allow daylight to enter into the deep plan while defining a large open living area, transparent towards the fenced garden.
The scheme shapes the main open area on the south-east corner of the site, where the pool is placed attached to the building.
Bedrooms are located on the upper floor, and towards south they hover above the living area as autonomous private units. They are carefully placed to create a generous semi-open space as well as double-height areas at ground level.
The main building volume is covered by a pitched double-curved roof which is clad with conventional ceramic roof tiles.
The roof-tile cladding cascades down the surface of the north wall, creating a rainscreen that contributes to the environmental performance of the house and conceptually to the visual impression of a seamless protective blanket.
This element, which provides coherence to the whole scheme reinterpreting the traditional ceramic-tile roof, is part of an attempt to shape an appropriate architectural identity –material and spatial- in a suburban context where traditional imagery and contemporary desires are fused and confused.
Our strategy also involved the selection of completely conventional materials and construction methods: white plaster, marble, stone veneer, wood. A typical palette of anonymous greek suburbia is therefore applied, in ways that are not conventional.
