The Eye is a private house on Amorgos, and the interest in it is the precedent its architects name. Mykonos Architects drew it from two particular Amorgos things: the island’s zevgospita farmhouses and the Monastery of Panagia Chozoviotissa, the white block wedged into the cliff above the south coast. What the studio says it is after is the island’s simplicity and its self-sustaining way of living.
The house is new construction, private client, dated 2022, and the studio still lists it as in progress. The practice signs its work Mykonos Architects | Echora, and it holds the whole job: architecture, interiors, lighting, landscape, supervision. The design team is Aude Mazelin, Xara Karatzali, Lina Lievano.
The ground did most of the deciding. The site has dramatic slopes and winds, so the main volume is cave-like and sited to put its back to the northern winds, with a traditional structure completing it for added shelter. Below the house the ground is worked in tiers, the orientation is set by the wind so that daylight and comfort survive the exposure, and the water is an infinity pool to the horizon. The studio’s own account sets the house between traditional island building and modern design, worked into rough ground.
What the monastery gives it
Chozoviotissa stands 300 metres above the sea on the harbourless south coast of Amorgos, visible only from the water. It is 40 metres long and its width never passes 5 metres. Because the building is that narrow its eight levels barely meet at any point, and the cells, the refectory, the kitchens, the ovens, the storerooms, the wine presses, the cisterns and the wells are all wedged into the natural rock, which does the work of a building material. An inscribed silver exapteryon, a liturgical fan, records a renewal under Alexios I Komnenos, the Byzantine emperor who reigned from 1081 to 1118, and a chrysobull of 1088 granted the monastery stavropegic rights.
What The Eye takes from this is the white volume and not the form. The studio is after the atmosphere of a church or a monastery without replicating one, and it works for that through earth and water rather than through a church plan. The studio’s own terms for what the white volume is for are minimalism and spiritual calm, and the outdoor rooms are where it expects the house to meet the ground it sits in. Against broken, many-coloured rock a plain white mass is what the monastery itself does on that coast, and only at close range does the light break its geometry into what reads as a many-levelled surface.
Two houses on one island
The Eye is not the only Amorgos house the studio has in progress. ichNos is the other, organised in two zones: the main living spaces on the upper level, and four independent guesthouses set into the hillside below them, with large openings framing the sea and the island of Nikouria. Aude Mazelin and Xara Karatzali are on that team as well, with Nikolas Alyssandratos.
Mazelin founded the practice, trained in France, and leads it as creative director and principal architect. It counts 15 people across Mykonos and Athens, with an office at Lino-Paragka on Mykonos and a second at Lempesi 13 in Athens, and it has been based on Mykonos for more than 20 years. Mazelin spoke at the esw interior design and architecture conference at the Megaron Athens Concert Hall on 7 May 2025.
Who is this for
Amorgos suits a reader content on an island that is mostly rock, and drawn to building wedged into it. Inside Chozoviotissa, narrow stone stairs, built up or hewn from the rock, carry between the levels, and the arches come in two manners: Byzantine, and the pointed ones of the Venetian years from 1296 to 1537, laid in stone and in poros brought from Milos. The cove of Agia Anna lies near the monastery, and the monastery’s outlines are austere and linear.
