The village is located on a rocky slope, covered with southern vegetation, descending to the sea. This place has recently been a pasture. The views around are not just magnificent, but some enchanting: the sea, the twists of the coastline, the contours of the mountains - an ancient land, an eternal and inexhaustible source of European culture. Here there was a proto-Minoan civilization, the first Christians fled here, here was and is one of the cult hippie colonies, finally.
Such a land, really, is scary to touch. Dmitry Alexandrov finds a way out: he screws the foundations of the houses into the tectonic plate, and hangs everything else with consoles around the residential core of the buildings. Therefore, it was not necessary to level the slope and fill large parts of the soil with concrete, as was done in one of the nearby Cretan villages. And the villas-cottages themselves hang over the mountain, directly corresponding to the name of the village, gazing intently into the sea with rectangles of panoramic windows.
The village will be located between two roads, one goes above, the other below its territory. New roads will not appear - residents will leave all cars in the parking lot in front of the entrance, moving further along the stairs connecting houses and villas. In the central part, one larger staircase is planned with a number of public buildings strung on it, including a church. From some points of view, stairs and paths will not be visible at all, houses, like nests, grow out of rocky clusters, without spoiling or obscuring the landscape, but only introducing a zest, a hint of housing. What is noteworthy is that the church, despite the remote proximity of the Byzantine temple of the 13th century, and the houses, despite the rich and tempting Cretan tradition, do not stylize anything. They remain within the framework of modernist simplicity, expressing their attitude towards local antiquity in some other way.
This village is like Turkish delight from a Lewis fairy tale, the more you talk about it, the more you want to go there. In every house there is a pool with sea water, its outer wall is transparent - you get pieces of the sea with home delivery, divorced from the elements only ephemerally. And also, swimming in the pool, it is good to look at the same sea from above. The houses will be concrete only in part, in the lower part natural stone is used, which works as a natural air conditioner - it is always cool behind such walls in the heat. In general, there are many architectural solutions that not only limit the invasion of nature, but also save energy - solar panels are planned on the roofs. The houses do not have very many living rooms, bedrooms, but there is enough space for rest - the entire lower part, slightly deepened into the slope - for the living room, hinged consoles of balconies carrying plants exotic for Crete on their concrete paws, stairs - everything is permeated with space, sea by the wind, the air that circulates here from the coast - from the bottom up.
All these architectural subtleties, apparently, were very well understood by the expert Vinka Dubbledam, the head of the American Bureau Archi-Tectonics, who, commenting on her choice, said: "… it is important for me that the architecture combines tradition and the latest design methods." Indeed, traditions here live in a deep, not stylistic, form - no columns, no artificial remnants of the past, only earth and sky and, according to tradition, love for them.
