The Papyrella project by ARP – Architecture Research Practice, is about renovating a 30-year-old vacation villa on Mykonos Island. The house, originally built in 1989, sits on a typical Mykonian rock with unobstructed views toward the sea and the sunset. The design objective focused on punctually intervening and rearranging some interior and exterior spaces to render them more usable while respecting the house’s vernacular Cycladic character.
Some aspects of the house were kept, such as the repainted wooden ceilings and the traditional mortar in the exterior walls. The exterior paving, made from Greek stone from Mount Pelion, was kept and expanded where necessary. Meanwhile, classic materials were introduced, creating a well-balanced relationship between vernacular and minimalist architecture, further highlighted by the client’s eclectic taste in furniture and design. The exterior paving was complimented with terrazzo floors in the interior.
At the same time, a fresh aqua color was chosen for the timber windows and shutters; the bathrooms and kitchen feature explicitly classic Greek marbles from the neighboring island of Naxos and Pentelikon marble from Attica. By extending the public spaces and consolidating terrace levels and smaller rooms into bigger ones, they reintroduced hierarchy and flow into the house and provided for a wider variety both in scale and in the character of private and public spaces to accommodate different visitor scenarios.