Aloni is a four-bedroom house on Antiparos, set in a natural saddle where two slopes meet and held between two long stone walls that bridge the hills on either side. The ground runs over the roof and carries on down the hill. Seen from anywhere else on the island, it barely registers as a building at all.
The house is the work of decaARCHITECTURE, which dates it to 2006 to 2008, with the landscape by Doxiadis+. On the north to south axis the slope rises between two hills. On the east to west axis it drops away and opens to the sea. The two walls make the saddle habitable while the line of the hill stays unbroken, and the long rectangular plan follows the V the land makes rather than cutting across it.
Oliaros, the Athens company that developed the house, lets it one week at a time, Saturday to Saturday, and nothing shorter. It takes eight guests in four bedrooms with four bathrooms, across 390 m² of building on 12,000 m² of land. The pool is 12 x 4.5 m, on a terrace facing the sea. The nearest beach is 350 m down the slope, Antiparos village and port 800 m the other way, and Paros airport 25 minutes.
Walls that make a landscape
The method is older than the house. The terraces that define the Aegean islands were built over centuries to make flat ground that could be farmed, and their walls were laid by hand without mortar, holding by gravity and friction alone. Each generation passed on what it knew about the two things in shortest supply, water and fertile soil: a terrace had to let water move through it rather than trap it. For a long time those walls were the largest human mark on the Cycladic landscape, and they turned bare rock into land that could feed a growing population.
A different force is reshaping the same islands, the demand for holiday homes. Aloni borrows the older technique for that newer purpose. Two long retaining walls carry a made landscape that is farmed and lived in at once, the terrain runs across the roof, and the line between house and hill is left unresolved.
Four courtyards and a harvesting circle
Four courtyards are cut into the mass of the house, and they do two jobs at once: they shelter the interior from the wind and they admit daylight to rooms that would otherwise sit inside a hill. They also organise the plan, dividing the interior into five parts. From outside they are close to the only evidence that anything has been built on the ground here.
The name came with the site. The remains of a crop-harvesting circle were found on it and kept as part of the land’s agricultural past, and the house is named for them.
Taking the house for a week
Aloni is one of 24 houses Oliaros commissioned on Antiparos, spread across four sites; seven of them stood by 2010. The others were drawn by practices including Atelier Bow-Wow, Harry Gugger Studio and Katerina Tsigarida. The wider Oliaros Private Collection is available only through Oliaros, and a guest who asks for it is given access.
The letting includes air conditioning, private parking, the pool with its sunbeds, linen changed twice a week and daily cleaning. The week runs Saturday to Saturday.
Who is this for
Aloni suits travellers who want the building to be the reason for the trip: two families sharing a week, or friends who will spend the first evening working out where the house ends and the hill begins. The setting is farmland rather than a resort strip, and the site takes in both sunrise and sunset, so the day is measured off the sky. Antiparos itself is small and quiet, a narrow channel away from Paros, and a week here is spent close to the ground.
