Photography by Clive Nichols.
We all have an idea about Greece and there is bound to be something ancient in it. In landscape architect Thomas Doxiadis‘ version of Greece, new angles combine with ancient contours.
When the Greek developer Iasson Tsakonas bought this section of Antiparos, he had a singular vision: minimum impact on the existing landscape, while making room for eight houses, each with pool and sea view. Tsakonas called in landscape architect Thomas Doxiadis, which was a good move.
Doxiadis teamed up with architect Terpsi Kremali for this project, and they brought in a group of talented young architects and designers, who worked on the 40-acre project as a whole. Even though the scale and size is so much bigger here, the houses still seem to rise out of the earth.
To avoid destroying the local order of stone walls and vegetation in the buiding process, it was only permissable for machinery to move around on the footprint of the actual dwellings.
Earth from the foundations was used to shore up and restore the terraces which had supported farming over the ages.
“We were all in love with the landscape,” says Thomas Doxiadis in Mediterranean Landscape Design. The vegetation here is made up of the prickly Centaurea spinosa, Sarcopoterium spinosum, and pot marigold Calendula arvensis.
Stone is integral to the terracing of this terrain and for enclosure. They remind us of how lovely roads can be.
The development is called Oliaris.
Planting around the house is naturalistic in the most deliberate sense. His studio has been propogating its own selected plant varieties for the site as they are not the kind of thing you’d pick up in the local garden center.
The houses here shimmer into the background, whether that is of land or sea. See Hike of the Week: Camino de Cavalls, Menorca.