Rooted in nature, rural landscapes, vernacular architecture, and closely connected to notions such as “disconnection,” “slow living,” and Martin Heidegger’s “Dasein,” namely the art of being present in the world, The Summer Refuge series, curated by Archt. for Archisearch, focuses on seasonal houses that shelter time, memory, and dreams.
In the rural landscape of Kallirroe, Messinia, the olive grove is not simply the setting in which architecture takes place. It is a cultivated terrain whose patterns of terraces, stone walls, paths and trees have been worked over generations by human hands, actively shaping the village’s history, economy, and topography. It is within this biocultural landscape, amidst olive grove terraces, that OOAK Architects situate OLIV, three independent summer houses, allowing architecture to emerge from the particular conditions of the site. Identifying Messinian landscape as cultural construction, these look-alike yet distinct summer refuges use topography as their architectural generator.
Kallirroe belongs to a part of Messinia where the landscape has historically been shaped by small rural settlements surrounded by olive cultivation, where the olive tree is not merely an agricultural crop. Olive cultivation has been documented in the region since at least the Early Bronze Age, with intensive cultivation during the Mycenaean period. Linear B tablets from the Palace of Nestor provide evidence for the importance of olives and olive oil in the Mycenaean economy.
Over centuries, the olive grove became almost a cultural landscape: trees, field boundaries, paths, terraces, agricultural buildings, wells, threshing floors and olive mills formed a connected system.
Historically, the olive tree shaped everyday life and local knowledge, from pruning and grafting to the olive harvest, which was a collective social event.
Families worked together from roughly November through January, spreading cloths beneath the trees, beating or shaking the branches, gathering the fallen fruit and carrying it to the liotrivi (olive oil mill). In Messinia, the liotrivi wasn’t simply an industrial building: it was part of the social infrastructure of the rural community and its productive topography.
Therefore, the contemporary Messinian landscape of seemingly endless olive groves is not simply “natural scenery”; it is a landscape produced and maintained by generations of agricultural labour. More broadly, the Mediterranean olive grove can be understood as a biocultural landscape: one in which ecological processes and human practices have accumulated over time to produce a landscape that is neither wholly natural nor simply agricultural (Ferrara, Sala and La Mantia, 2024).
For a village like Kallirroë, the olive grove can be understood almost as an extension of the settlement. From the village and the houses, to the yards and agricultural paths, to olive fields, the mill and ultimately the olive oil, the final product, architecture and landscape blended into each other seamlessly.
In this sense, the olive grove is not the backdrop to the village; it is one of the things that made the village possible.
Three houses, one terrain
The site, a centuries-old olive grove marked by an intense topography and expansive views across the Messinian plain, is not a picturesque landscape onto which the houses happen to look; it is the territorial condition to which they respond.
The three houses are distributed across the existing terraces, following the curvature of the mountain and the geometry of the stone retaining walls. Their olive-green façades resonate chromatically with the foliage, allowing the buildings to recede into the grove when seen from a distance.
Belonging to a longer Mediterranean tradition in which the cultivation of the land produces its own architecture of walls, thresholds, paths, shaded spaces and working structures, the houses enter this pre-existing order with a deliberately light touch, residing in the material and topographical intelligence of the site: its slope, its stone terraces, its vegetation, its orientation and its long history of cultivation.
The fundamental design question was how three houses could coexist with one another and with the landscape while remaining distinct and autonomous.
The answer lies in calibrated positioning. The three volumes are scattered across the terraced site, close enough to constitute a coherent ensemble yet sufficiently separated to preserve privacy. They share a common architectural language but are individually adapted to the precise conditions of their respective positions.
As a result, differences in scale, geometry and internal organisation emerge naturally from the terrain.
Architecture is dispersed across the slope, allowing the topography to remain legible between and around the houses. Existing stone walls become both physical and conceptual guides, while the outdoor paths and surfaces are constructed from stone found on the site, extending the material vocabulary of the terraces into the new architecture. The houses do not imitate vernacular architecture, nor do they attempt to disappear through literal camouflage; they allow the conditions of the landscape to determine the way they sit, open and materialise.
The same logic extends into the relationship between interior and exterior. Each house establishes its own sequence of private outdoor spaces and olive-grove terraces, while large openings are carefully oriented towards both the immediate landscape and the distant Messinian horizon.
The windows do not simply maximise views; they construct particular relationships with the landscape, turning the surrounding olive grove into an extension of domestic space.
Following a phenomenological understanding of architecture as a multisensory encounter that is experienced through the body’s continuous engagement with material, light, and texture, in OLIV the landscape is not something encountered only through the eye. It is approached through the movement between house and terrace, the changing quality of natural light across the olive trees, the tactility of wood, soil, and stone beneath the feet and the shifting horizon beyond.
Looking outward
The interiors are correspondingly restrained. White walls, ceilings and furniture create a neutral field against which the landscape can register with greater intensity. Timber floors continue into staircases, while wood reappears in shelving, countertops and mobile furniture, introducing a warmer tactile layer without competing with the exterior.
The olive-green window and door frames and shutters extend the colour of the façades into the interiors, allowing the openings to compose domestic views of the surrounding olive trees and valley. Rather than filling the interiors with objects and architectural gestures, the project allows attention to move outward.
OLIV belongs to a particular lineage of Mediterranean summer architecture in which the value of the retreat lies not in its autonomy from its surroundings but in its capacity to intensify one’s relationship with them.
The house offers shade, enclosure and privacy, but it also repeatedly returns its inhabitants to the olive grove: through the terraces, through the framed views, through the material continuity of stone and timber, and through the powerful presence of the trees.
With OLIV, OOAK Architects propose summer refuge as a way of inhabiting the landscape.
Its three houses remain deliberately distinct, yet their architecture is held together by the terrain that surrounds them. The olive grove becomes both the project’s physical context and its spatial protagonist—a living, cultivated ground within which architecture finds its measure.
Facts & Credits
Project title OLIV – Three houses in Kalliroe, Messinia
Typology The Summer Refuge, Residential
Episode 16th
Location Kalliroe, Messinia, Peloponnese, Greece
Lot area 14.365,63 m²
Total area 306,06m²
Status Completed, 2011
Architecture OOAK architects | Maria Papafigou and Johan Annerhed
Design team Maria Papafigou, Johan Annerhed and Alexandra Kizskielis
Structural engineer Lazaros Kotsias
Mechanical engineer Dimitris Gizelis
Supervision Maria Papafigou and Johan Annerhed
Interior design Μaria Papafigou and Johan Annerhed
Photography Yiannis Hadjiaslanis