From a young age, architects Ermis Adamantidis and Dominiki Dadatsi spent summer holidays in Halkidiki, a forested coastal area in northern Greece about an hour’s drive from Thessaloniki, where they live and work together today as Not a Number Architects (NaNA). When presented with the opportunity to build on a tree-filled plot on Halkidiki owned by Adamantidis’s parents, the couple were eager to work on a project for themselves. Wanting to share their memories of the area with their own two children, the couple built a summerhouse on the plot. In addition to their private residence, the architects cleverly incorporated two additional dwellings into the building, which are rented to seasonal vacationers. “It’s our refuge,” Dadatsi told AN Interior.
Spread across the narrow, 2,700-square-foot plot in a linear “Z” shape that weaves between existing olive and pine trees, the three-in-one holiday house combines two stone towers with a white horizontal volume partially in stone. Dubbed “Treelithon” in reference to its trilithon-inspired form, the holiday complex’s unique shape is an expression of the architects’ site-specific approach.
“The common case is that identical 2-story residences are attached side by side, creating the widely prevalent local phenomenon of the “centipede” building,” explained Adamantidis. “Our intention was to try and break this common practice.” To do this, NaNA wanted to make the single volume as long as possible to take advantage of the extended, narrow buildable zone that runs down the center of the site, all while preserving the mature trees on the plot. With these constraints, they also aimed to differentiate the three dwellings in materiality and posture. “Here is the loose connection with a trilithon as a three-part synthesis of verticality and horizontality,” Adamantidis said. “A gesture that creates a clear architectural identity while allowing each house to express its own internal logic.”
During the summer vacation as well as most weekends in the warmer months, the architects occupy the roughly 800-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom dwelling housed in the 2-story tower and the lower, stone portion of the central horizontal volume.
“The idea is to have a single-floor layout on the same level with the garden, which we very much enjoy most of the time during summer,” Adamantidis enthused. That includes two bedrooms with a bathroom in between that are positioned at the back and almost underground, as they are in the slope from the west side to naturally keep them cool during the hot season. And then there’s a small living room with a kitchen at the front with large openings to enjoy the views to the greenery. “But our actual living room is the terrace under the four pine trees, where we gather family and friends around a long table and in the coolness of the shade,” he said. An upper-level guest bedroom generously offers the best view to the architects’ friends and family.
To offer everyone privacy, their dwelling was designed to face away from the other two—the upper horizontal volume, which includes two bedrooms and measures 530 square feet, and the 3-story, three-bedroom tower, which, like their own, measures around 800 square feet and offers views to the sea. Both of the rental units face the pool, include spacious terraces, and are accessed through their own separate entrances (lockable sliding doors; the front door provides access to the architects’ abode).
Inspired by the area’s rural stone architecture and the neighboring remains of the Byzantine-era stone watchtowers, the holiday home is constructed of stone sourced from a nearby quarry, embracing NaNA’s dedication to material experimentation, which the duo have explored since the firm’s founding.
“We always try to bring materiality into another context, [to] push the boundaries in a more playful way,” Dadatsi said. Here the stone walls are load-bearing. They are punctured with openings in various shapes and sizes to frame the view, modulate daylight, and foster passive cross ventilation. “It was an exploration for ourselves to learn the material in a special way,” Adamantidis said.
The “restrained yet tactile” interior palette includes stone walls left exposed or painted white, floors finished in terrazzo, and timber furniture, staircases, and doors. Adamantidis explained that they placed emphasis on “softening the mineral tones and reinforcing the project’s sensorial balance.”
“It’s nice to see how nature changes from spring [to] summer,” he said. “And the sounds are different. When you walk in spring, you listen to the sound of the birds and then, in the summer, the cicadas.”