In a place where vernacular architecture and folk art are deeply woven into the landscape, designing anew in Tinos is an exercise in restraint: how to speak in contemporary terms without rupturing the continuity of place, or retreating into mimicry. The twenty-fifth episode of Stories of Contemporary Domesticity or HOMEland — a series curated by Archt. for Archisearch, exploring evolving interpretations of home through contemporary architectural practices — follows architect Kelly Spanou, in collaboration with Penny Alevizou, into the woven constellation of Tinos’ mountain villages. This is the story of a 115-square-metre house that, through architecture, found its way back to becoming a home.
An existing Tinian house, rooted in the keli (cell), the modest rural structure characteristic of Cycladic agricultural landscape, had been subjected to successive and intrusive alterations over time. Adopting a symbiotic design approach in which heterogeneity, irregularity, tactility and roughness are allowed to coexist, the building is reconfigured as a contemporary continuation of its surroundings: from the outside, it reads as an extension of Tinos’ distinctive arid landscape, while within, architectural space unfolds through sculptural gestures and forms that resonate with an island building ethos in which architecture and sculpture have long existed in inseparable dialogue — from carved marble fanlights and ornate façades to the sculptural geometry of its traditional dovecotes.
Tinos’ vernacular architecture can itself be understood as a material palimpsest that emerges directly from the terrain rather than standing apart from it. Shaped over time through an intimate negotiation between craft, topography and climate, local schist and marble, dry-stone walls and hand-carved terraces weave a continuous material language between dwelling and landscape (Tinos Virtual Museum, n.d.).
At the turn where Lychnaftia meets Dio Choria, the house unfolds across two levels, following the natural inclination of the terrain.
“Much of the house’s material character had been concealed behind plasterboard, false ceilings, partitions and applied finishes, while a concrete structural system had been introduced during an earlier renovation. The new design works with the building’s existing irregularities, material imperfections and traces of different periods of construction, embracing these conditions rather than attempting to erase them,” explains the architect.
In recent years, a new generation of architects has increasingly turned towards practices of restoration, reuse and care, questioning the impulse to erase the past in favour of seamless newness, while reframing architecture as a healing practice capable of bringing buildings back to their authentic core, their original being, their material essence.
House in Tinos follows this path. Its first architectural gesture is therefore not one of addition, but of subtraction: a careful and meticulous operation of stripping away the accumulated layers that had obscured the building’s physical presence, allowing the house to recover its material intelligibility through exposure.
Rather than restoring it to an imagined original state, the project allows the building to recover through the very traces of its transformation, treating its accumulated history not as an imperfection to be corrected, but as part of its renewed identity.
“Layers were removed to reveal the physical structure of the house: original stone masonry alongside concrete slabs, columns and beams belonging to later periods of construction. Rather than resolving the contrast between them, both were retained and exposed. The existing industrial floor finish was similarly removed, revealing a patchwork of concrete beneath. Cracks, marks and inconsistencies were preserved, allowing the surface to retain evidence of its previous use and transformation,” says Kelly.
There is something profoundly reparative in this refusal to erase. The building is approached almost as a body bearing the marks of time: its scars are not defects to be corrected but traces through which its previous lives remain legible.
Architecture becomes an act of care, not by returning the house to an imagined purity, but by allowing it to inhabit its own history.
In this sense, the project resonates with British/Welsh eco-architect, self-builder and sculptor Christopher Day’s understanding of architecture as an environmental and experiential practice capable of nurturing body and spirit through its relationship with place, material and the senses (Day, 2004). His proposition that buildings should be understood not simply as objects, but as environments intrinsic to their surroundings, becomes particularly relevant here: the house is not restored in an attempt to return to its primal keli structure, but to a renewed condition of inhabitation that acknowledges and embraces the island’s contemporary becoming, with all its intrinsic contradictions and dissonances.
Tinos is an island where architecture has texture, and here tactility becomes the house’s hallmark quality.
Stone, marble and fida (oak) — the signature materials of the local building tradition — are revealed and reintroduced into an open dialogue with concrete, the material reminder of the building’s unsettled construction history.
“Surfaces retain traces of how they were made, aged or worked, creating material encounters experienced through touch as much as through sight,” confirms the architect.
The resulting domestic atmosphere operates in a distinctly phenomenological register. Architecture here is not addressed simply to the eye, but to the moving, touching, sensing body. As Juhani Pallasmaa argues, architectural experience is fundamentally embodied: the senses do not operate as isolated instruments but converge through the body, while the authenticity of architecture lies partly in the sensory intelligibility of its materials and construction (Pallasmaa, 1996). The house invites the body to relinquish its protective distance and return to the elemental: bare feet across natural surfaces, a hand encountering stone.
The ruggedness of concrete and stone is set against the slickness of marble and the queer softness of wood, producing a material environment experienced as much through the body as through vision.
The irregularity of the materiality is equally retained in the architectural plan, where the non-orthogonal geometry, distinctive of informal and incremental self-construction, is not regularised but embraced. This logic of continuity extends into the new construction process, where reclaimed marble is given new life as sinks, counters and floor details, treated less as a decorative finish than as a working material. Nothing here is asked to forget where it came from.
This attitude towards place recalls Christian Norberg-Schulz’s (1980) understanding of architecture as the concrete expression of a genius loci — an architecture capable of gathering the particular qualities of a place rather than imposing an abstract order upon it. House in Tinos does not pretend to have always been there; it holds a record of the island’s architectural codes, rearticulating its arid terrain, material culture and accumulated inconsistencies through a contemporary architectural language.
And just like that, all of a sudden, here comes a one-of-a-kind performative kitchen, built as a real-life domestic installation, referencing the untamed wilderness of the Tinian landscape as it passes through the house’s soul.
“Conceived as both a functional and sculptural object, the kitchen combines raw concrete, stone and marble and is positioned independently from the surrounding walls, allowing circulation to unfold freely around it,” says Kelly.
The kitchen becomes less a piece of furniture than an inhabitable sculpture — an object around which domestic life can choreograph itself. Architecture, furniture and sculpture begin to overlap, recalling Tinos’ own tradition of highly crafted architectural elements, where utility and ornament have historically existed in close proximity, revealing a culture in which making and craftsmanship remain inseparable.
In the same logic of opening the house towards the surrounding terrain, new openings strengthen visual connections, while exterior walls, terraces, stairs and paths respond to its directions and changes in level. A new swimming pool, an outdoor kitchen and planted areas are arranged to organise circulation and establish a dialogue between what has been newly made and what was already lying there: brutal, authentic, and raw.
This is exactly where the project’s quiet radicalism lies. It does not attempt to make the house pristine, nor does it retreat into a nostalgic imitation of the vernacular. Instead, it allows the building to remain marked by different times, materials and hands. Its brutality is softened by tactility; its irregularity becomes a form of authenticity; its scars become part of its contemporary domestic character.
Its beauty lies not in the absence of traces, but in its willingness to make a home between them.
Facts & Credits
Project title House In Tinos
Typology Stories of Contemporary Domesticity, Renovation, Residential
Episode 24th
Location Tinos Island, Cyclades, Greece
Status Completed, 2025
Area 115m2
Lead Architect Kelly Spanou
Design Collaborator Penny Alevizou
Photography Lorenzo Zandri
Bibliography
Day, C. (2004) Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. 2nd edn. Oxford: Architectural Press.
Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.
Pallasmaa, J. (1996) The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley. First published 1996; the work remains a foundational text on embodied and multisensory architectural experience.
Tinos Virtual Museum (n.d.) ‘Architecture’. Available at: Tinos Virtual Museum (Accessed: 19 August 2026).