CYCLADIC SENSIBILITY.

House of Mykonos in the Cyclades is partly carved of construction and planning.

Mykonos is remembered by hippies, architects (following the Corb trail to the East), and by a continuously rising tide of tourists as a powerfully picturesque white village of cubic houses and stunning organic churches, all overwhelmed by massive crowds of visiting humanity.

Panormos Bay, deeply penetrating the north coast of the island, is some way from the port, and its hillsides still retain much of their original character: arid, harsh and boulder strewn, with shrubby herbs gnawed almost down to desert soil by beasts that are checked only by stone walls that straggle over the landscape. The Kerassiotis house sits prismatically clear against this wild backdrop. From a distance it seems almost like a small castle, like the traditional self-contained houses of the area which were semi-fortified to protect their inhabitants from pirates.

You enter from the north and come into a new world. A shaded peristyle runs round two sides of a suggested court. The sublime view of the bay, which you have had out of the corner of your eye on the drive up the track from the main road, suddenly becomes intensified, but not tamed. You are enclosed by the protective perimeter, but opened to the landscape; terraces fall to a pool, beyond which is the sea. Manidakis was concerned to protect the central space (Mykonos can be very hot but there are almost perpetual winds). So he massed the building to north and west, and then cut into the eastern knoll to get shelter from that direction.

The main internal volume is a tall symmetrical formal reception area, with a mezzanine that runs detached from the sides over the centre of the space, providing a more private and cosy place upstairs with a fireplace for cold days. Filtered light pours in from rows of little windows high up, and from the glass doors that look toward the bay. The two double-height voids between mezzanine and perimeter act as thermal chimneys on hot days.

To the west of this cubic block is a range of more intimate, private spaces: kitchen, bedrooms and so on, all of which are close to the peristyle. The household seems to live in summer under its shading bamboo canes. Filigree strips of bright slanting light filtered by the bamboo move slowly with the sun and pick up the sparkle of specially chosen sand in the adobe-like render. At the knuckle of the north-eastern hinge between the northern reception wing and the private western one is a totally enclosed court, in which little square holes in the top of the perimeter walls encourage the venturi effect, to make the space cool as well as shaded in hottest weather. Manidakis has thought of climatic tactics, of every view, of many subtle moments between public and private realms. The house is moving to visit, and plainly excellent to stay in.