Peninsula is the house Iasson Tsakonas kept for himself. His company, Oliaros, has spent two decades commissioning houses on Antiparos to be let or sold; this one, on a seafront plot, is the holiday house he and his family keep. The practice that drew it is Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo, founded by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, and what they set on the ground is two stone masses with water running between them.
The dates are land bought 2006, design selected 2008, and he had always planned Peninsula as his future family house. When he married Argyro Pouliovali the couple went through the alternatives in the Oliaros portfolio and kept this one, with adjustments so it would work better for a family.
The ground decided most of the plan. Most of the site is a designated nature conservation area, and that restriction, together with the wind, set the volume of the building and the way it is laid out. So the house is two volumes rather than one, and the pool runs through the two areas the constraint created. Oliaros gives the figure as a 75 m water line through the house, with a stone wall turning around white volumes inside and out. Tsakonas puts that canal at the centre of what the architects proposed: it connects and runs through two parts they named separately, ‘the ruin’, an open-air barbecue pavilion, and ‘the village’, the family building.
Two volumes and the rooms between them
The building area is 400 sq m, the total floor area 519 sq m, and the structure is reinforced concrete, with Stefanos Nasopoulos as local architect. The two volumes are brought together by a composed sequence of outdoor areas laid out with Doxiadis+, Athens: terraces, places to sit and eat outside, open-air routes from one part of the house to another, and the long pool that connects the two stone masses. The materials are stone, white concrete, blue ceramics, Tinos marble, Pentelikon marble, wood and white coloured cement.
The pool tiles were designed by the architects Aires Mateus and made by Viúva Lamego in Portugal. A central courtyard that the pool helps cool holds blue chairs by Martino Gamper and a marble table by ARP, the Athens studio Argyro Pouliovali founded. Four seats by Studio Wieki Somers stand on one of the terraces.
A Japanese hand on Cycladic ground
One terrace is paved to a pattern taken from gyosho calligraphy and Japanese garden design, and the reference Tsukamoto gives is the pavement at the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. What draws him to the Mediterranean is the vernacular architecture that comes out of a harsh environment, and Oliaros’s practice of spacing houses well apart so the landscape survives the development. Peninsula is the first house Atelier Bow-Wow designed on Antiparos and the third of its houses there to be built, after Antiparos Ring and Tree House, both for the same developer.
The collection indoors
Whitewashed walls and light concrete floors carry Tsakonas’s collection. He started buying while working in real estate in Azerbaijan, and after he returned to Athens to set up Oliaros in 2001 the collection grew past 500 pieces of contemporary art, design, ceramics and Azeri rugs. The living room holds a sculpture by Oscar Tuazon, a bar by Ilias Lefas, a dining table by José Zanine Caldas, a games table by Sergio Rodrigues and a work by Mindy Shapero.
Who is this for
Peninsula suits a reader who travels for buildings and wants to see what one developer has made of a Cycladic island. Oliaros has worked with more than 25 architecture studios in over 20 years, Nicos Valsamakis, Sou Fujimoto and Bjarke Ingels Group among them, and its houses sit on dry, windy ground well above the water. The roof terrace here carries a backlit circular table, the seating runs to chairs by Waka-Waka and a Philippe Starck coffee table, and solar panels cover the pergola over the parking space.
