Somanou is two single-level houses and a stable, standing above Ano Koufonisi in the Small Cyclades. The houses are independent of each other and share one design language, and the stable is an old one converted to take residential use, so the three buildings read together as a small, private hamlet. The client is Somanou itself. The site looks over open sea, with a traditional Cycladic settlement beside it.
The architectural interest is the refusal of the single large villa. GFRA split the programme into separate volumes and let the gaps between them do the work: walled courtyards and half-open rooms, kept at the scale of island building. Access is from the eastern side, where the two houses share a parking area. Two paths run up from it, one to each house, so neither depends on the other for its way in.
Each house is entered through a low volume that distributes the movement through the plan. The open living, dining and kitchen area sits along the front façade and steps slightly forward of the volumes behind it. The primary bedroom is on the front as well, facing the sea, and has its own bath; between it and the living volume a private courtyard is formed for each house, sheltered from the wind. The bedrooms are three to each house, two at the rear. Each of the rear rooms has its own bath and its own small walled courtyard with an outdoor bath and shower.
The front of the complex carries a pool and a hydrotherapy area to each house, with outdoor sitting rooms along the façade.
Earthy render, local stone and cane
The façades are rendered in a light earthy tone drawn from the Cycladic palette. Wood, stone, marble and cane carry the rest of the material language, and local stone runs through the outdoor works. The materials came through Bagno y Bagno.
The hands on it
GFRA architecture was founded in Athens in 2004 by Tasos Gousis, Joost Frijda and Eddie Roberts, and its recent work includes the refurbished embassies of Ireland and Denmark in Athens. Its other island houses include Linear Flow and Hidden Hill on Naxos and Crimson View on Ios. Somanou was drawn by GFRA Architecture; designed 2021, completed 2025, with Eddie Roberts and Orestis Kalonaris on the design team and Manos Kypritidis on the interiors. Nikos Mylonas did the structural design and Manolis Kontopoulos the mechanical; the landscape is Maria Sfyraki with Manos Kypritidis, and Christos Drazos took the photographs.
Much of what fills the houses was made for them. The ceramic objects and the sculptural furniture are Studio Obscoura, commissioned for this site alone and made for no other. At the centre of that collection is the Night Table, designed by Manos Kypritidis and curated by Studio Obscoura.
The holding page
The address is Ano Koufonisi 84300, Koufonisia. The house’s own site holds a single page, which says “the complete Somanou experience is coming soon”, and its only other text is a palindrome addressed to a fountain: «ΕΥ Ω ΠΑΓΑ, ΣΩΜΑ ΝΟΟΝ ΑΜ’, ΩΣ ΑΓΑΠΩ, ΥΕ». It reads the same letter by letter in either direction, and it asks the fountain to cool down body and mind alike. At its centre stand the words soma noon, body and mind. The complete house has not yet opened to guests.
Who is this for
Somanou suits a reader who travels for architecture, and who likes a building drawn for one site and nowhere else. Nothing here rises above a single storey. The ground has been left much as it was found: Mediterranean planting, rock rather than lawn, and interventions around the buildings that are deliberately slight. Between the two houses a shared barbecue and dining area opens to both, for the evenings when everybody eats together.
