House e

The small house, located at the third row from the shore of the haphazardly and densely built coastal suburb of Artemis, Attica, critically responds to and conceptualizes its context. The building aims at redefining the 'ephemeral' and flexible nature of living close to the coast, by achieving comfortable and high quality indoor and outdoor living spaces and revealing selected views to the sea while screening off its residents’ privacy from the close neighbors. Upon an expressed concrete base, the volume of a two-storey building is broken into two -volumetrically and materially different volumes- placed at right angles to each other. The white, seemingly floating pitched-roof volume with its cantilevers, delineates a generous open plan ground floor space for easy indoor and outdoor living within the garden enclosure. The upper volume provides two impressive high ceiling bedrooms and a bathroom organized around a stairwell / study. On the party wall side, a protected terrace becomes an open-air 'room', the outdoor extension to the stairwell. The bedrooms have access to two private loggias with the bathroom placed in their in-between. In terms of construction, the building is a composite construction with the minimum footprint on the small plot. Τhe basement and ground floors are concrete. The ground floor dissolves to the minimum building elements -two, fair-faced concrete shear walls and four slender steel columns- to achieve maximum spatial flexibility and visual continuity with the garden. The first floor slab is a combination of two cantilevering steel beams with a solid 10cm thick concrete slab. The upper volume and its pitched roof are constructed as a lightweight steel system of columns and roof beams.