Neiheiser Argyros Strips a 1970s Greek House Back to Its Concrete Grid and Starts Again

Most renovations try to fix what's wrong with a building. The more interesting ones find something the original architect buried and bring it to the surface. Grid House, completed in 2022 by London and Athens practice Neiheiser Argyros, does exactly that. The original house in Minas, on the island of Euboea, was designed by Greek architect Nikos Hadjimichalis in the 1970s. It had a clean concrete structural grid, but the house disguised it, wrapping the frame in walls and partitions that concealed the repetitive logic underneath. The renovation guts everything and lets the grid speak.

What makes the project worth studying is the economy of the idea. A regular concrete grid is not an unusual starting point, but the way Neiheiser Argyros exploits it to produce both enclosed rooms and open outdoor spaces, all within the same structural rhythm, turns a humble renovation into a demonstration of how much variety a single system can generate. Some bays are filled with brick, others with full-height glass, and others are left completely open to become covered terraces, pergolas, and balconies. The 250 square meter house orients its six bedrooms on the lower floor and an open-plan kitchen, living, and dining room on the upper floor, all looking across the Evoian Sea.

Revealing the Frame

The most legible move is visible from the garden side. Board-marked concrete columns and beams march across the facade in strict rhythm, and between them the infill changes: floor-to-ceiling glazing in one bay, a brick wall in the next, nothing at all in the one after that. Hadjimichalis's original house masked this structure behind continuous surfaces. Stripping it back makes the repetition explicit and lets the differences between bays register as deliberate choices rather than hidden compromises.

The board-marked concrete has been finished with a grey paint that gives the columns and beams a consistent, almost chalky tone. Steel columns appear in places alongside the concrete, and metal balustrades, window frames, and galvanized grating provide a secondary material register that is clearly industrial but never heavy. The palette is restrained: grey concrete, white brick, warm wood, marble. There is no material that isn't doing structural or environmental work.

Living Between Inside and Out

The grid's real payoff is the outdoor space it generates. Along the western side of the house, semi-covered terraces benefit from shade during the hottest part of the day while keeping views open to the sea. A pergola extends the concrete grid into the landscape, equipped with built-in seating that makes the boundary between building and garden genuinely ambiguous. At dusk these covered patios become the most atmospheric rooms in the house, framing distant hills and water through a colonnade of painted columns.

The covered poolside terrace, with its slatted timber ceiling and pink cushioned seating, is a good example of how much the project gets from relatively modest means. The space is defined entirely by the grid: columns set the edges, beams set the height, and the slats filter light without enclosing it. There is no bespoke pavilion, no freestanding cabana. The grid does the work.

A Staircase That Stitches Two Houses Together

One of the more consequential decisions was the insertion of a new staircase that connects what were previously two separate, independent houses. The helical staircase, clad in copper expanded metal mesh with pale stone treads, is the most expressive single element in the project. It spirals up beside the kitchen counter, visible through a doorway punched into a white wall, and its warm metallic surface is a deliberate counterpoint to the cool grey concrete everywhere else.

The wire mesh balustrade at the entry repeats the same material logic on a different scale. Transparent enough to preserve sightlines, sturdy enough to feel safe, and visually linked to the staircase by the use of expanded metal. It is a small move, but it shows how carefully the material palette was calibrated so that each element connects back to another.

Ground Floor Bedrooms, Open to the Garden

Placing the bedrooms on the lower floor is a smart inversion. Each one gets a sliding glass door that opens directly to the paved patio and garden beyond, giving every bedroom the character of a ground-floor apartment with its own outdoor space. Mature palm and pine trees are close enough to the glass to feel like they belong to the room. The upper floor, where the open-plan living spaces sit, captures the longer views across the Evoian Sea from its elevated vantage point.

The interiors are deliberately understated. White brick walls, marble countertops, and vertical tongue-and-groove cabinetry keep the rooms quiet. A round concrete vessel sink in the bathroom and a simple framed mirror in the kitchen are the closest the project comes to decorative gestures, and even those feel like natural extensions of the material logic.

The Landscape Cascades Toward the Sea

Landscape architect Marios Grogos of Greenplus designed a garden that wraps around the house and cascades in terraces down toward the water. The sloped terrain is handled with grey brick retaining walls that share their color and texture with the house's infill panels, so the building appears to grow out of the site rather than sit on top of it. Native shrubs, cypress trees, and purple flowering plants soften the hard edges without hiding the architecture.

From below, at dusk, the illuminated grey brick volumes read as abstract masses embedded in the hillside, with the structural grid visible only where the glass bays glow from within. It is a completely different reading of the same house: from the garden side, all transparency and rhythm; from the slope below, mass and weight. That duality is one of the project's best qualities.

Details and Finishes

The kitchen counter in pale marble, set against vertical timber cabinetry, is the kind of detail that separates a thoughtful renovation from a cosmetic one. The marble is thick enough to feel substantial, and the cabinetry pattern echoes the verticality of the structural columns. In the bathroom, open timber shelving and a concrete sink maintain the same tonal restraint. These are rooms designed for daily life, not for photographs, and they wear well precisely because there is nothing precious about them.

The entry sequence, with its gravel driveway, planted beds, and concrete steps leading through glazed sliding doors, establishes the house's character immediately. You arrive at the grid, not at a facade. The structure is the identity.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan makes the grid legible in a way the photographs cannot. Every bay is the same dimension, and the plan reads as a filled-in matrix: some cells are rooms, some are terraces, some are void. The axonometric drawing confirms how the pool, garden paths, and illuminated landscape elements are all organized on the same grid, extending the structural logic well beyond the building's footprint. Elevations reveal how different each face of the house is despite sharing the same structural system. The garden elevation is almost entirely glass. The street-facing side is mostly brick. The strategy is always the same: fill or empty the grid according to what each orientation demands.

Why This Project Matters

Grid House is a renovation that argues for looking harder at what already exists before designing anything new. The original 1970s house by Nikos Hadjimichalis had a strong structural idea that its own finishes obscured. Neiheiser Argyros's intervention is essentially subtractive: strip away what hides the grid, then selectively fill it back in with brick, glass, or nothing at all. The result is a house that feels both new and inherited, specific to its site and generic in its system.

At a time when renovation is increasingly understood as more sustainable than demolition and new construction, this project offers a useful model. The grid did not need to be rebuilt; it needed to be revealed. The variety of indoor, outdoor, and semi-outdoor spaces the house now contains all emerge from a single structural decision made fifty years ago. What changed is how that decision is read, occupied, and extended into the landscape. That is enough.

Grid House by Neiheiser Argyros, Minas, Euboea, Greece. 250 sq.m. Completed 2022. Structural engineering by Michalis Michelatos. Landscape design by Marios Grogos, Greenplus. Photography by Lorenzo Zandri.

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