Kamenica House

Kamenica House was a ruin that the island was in no hurry to see rebuilt. The stone walls had stood since the eighteenth century, roofless for the last fifty years, and every builder who had walked the plot had quoted the same answer: it would be cheaper and easier to build new.

We agreed it would be cheaper. We disagreed about everything else.

The site is a collapsed stone terrace dropping straight to the Adriatic — the kind of plot that exists in Dalmatia by the hundreds and by the grace of no planner. The walls that remained were measured, numbered, and rebuilt stone for stone using the island's own limestone, cut and laid by the same families who have always cut it here.

The roof follows the old pitch, tiled in the local calotta, and the openings stay exactly where the original cased windows sat. Inside, the walls are left as masonry — lime-rendered on the north wall, bare stone where the old plaster had long since given up.

The only genuinely new element is the ground-floor loggia, opened to the terrace and the sea, which the original building never had. It is the one liberty taken, and it is the one that makes the ruin a house again.

Kamenica House reads from the harbour as the same roofline it has held for three hundred years. It simply has a roof on it again.