Cycladic House

Cycladic House began as a refusal to "summer-ify" a barn. The structure — a two-room livestock shelter on a hillside above Naoussa — had spent most of a century keeping goats and doing nothing else. The clients bought it for the view and, luckily for us, for almost everything else it already was.

The site sits high on the dry west slope of the valley, where the island's rubble-stone field walls give way to bare rock and a wind that never entirely stops. The village is visible below; the sea beyond it. Nothing about the plot suggested a villa, which was precisely the point.

The design kept the original two-room footprint and the full height of the old walls, and did almost everything else inside them. New openings were cut sparingly — one long window to the sea, a narrow slot to the sky — and the flat concrete slab was poured to hang just clear of the rubble, so the old walls read as masonry and not as props.

Inside, the plaster is the same lime the island has always used; the shutters are pine, painted the deep blue every Cycladic door gets eventually. The addition is a single shaded terrace, held off the slope on the same stone the walls are built from.

It is a small building that knows exactly what it is — a barn that let a little light in and grew up to have a view.