Ona i Ona Wraps a Multi-Generational Summer House Around a Hexagonal Courtyard in Paralimni, Cyprus

The courtyard house is one of the oldest domestic types on Cyprus, and one of the most often reduced to nostalgia. With The Avlí Houses in Paralimni, Ona i Ona Architecture and Design, led by Eleni Flouri and Laoura Maria Fotiou, treats the type as a working tool. The project is a 220 m² multi-generational summer retreat completed in 2025 on the agricultural edge of the town in the Famagusta district. Its name is the Greek word for courtyard, and the plan delivers on that name.

The interesting move is geometric. The rooms do not frame a rectangular yard. They wrap a hexagonal court with a round plunge pool at its center, and two small bedroom towers rise on opposite corners. The result keeps a single shared outdoor room for the whole family while giving each generation a retreat above the roofline. It is a compact, inward-looking house in a flat, open landscape, and the tension between those two conditions shapes almost every decision we can see.

Stepped Volumes on a Ploughed Field

From the surrounding fields, the house reads as a cluster of pale stucco boxes rather than one object. The low perimeter wing holds the ground, and the two raised blocks break the horizon at different points, so the silhouette changes as you move around it. In low sun the stepped walls cut hard shadow lines, which is a better ornament than anything applied.

The windows are small, square and deeply recessed. On a Mediterranean summer house that is a climatic statement as much as an aesthetic one: thick reveals shade the glass and keep the street faces quiet. The orange tree and gravel beds at the corners suggest a landscape approach, credited to Antia Georgiou, that favors dry planting over lawn.

A Guarded Threshold

The entrance is a single gate in an otherwise blank wall: an olive-green steel frame with a wire mesh panel, pivoting open beneath a thin concrete canopy. The mesh lets you glimpse the interior without exposing it, which is exactly what a courtyard house threshold should do.

Small details keep this edge from feeling defensive. A climbing vine is already taking the wall, and a brass bulkhead lamp sits beside the mesh screen. These are modest, durable choices, the kind that improve as the house weathers through salt air and summer heat.

The Court and the Round Pool

Inside the wall, the house opens completely. Sliding glass walls line the court, so the kitchen, living room and pool share one field of view. The round plunge pool is a smart scale decision: large enough to cool off in, small enough to leave room for chairs, a tree and gravel underfoot. It works as a gathering point rather than a swimming lane.

The hexagonal plan matters here. Angled walls widen the views across the court and avoid the corridor feeling that a narrow rectangular yard can produce. A perforated screen wall closes one side, filtering light and air while preserving enclosure. The architects' own diagram shows cross ventilation arrows running through the plot, and the court is clearly the engine of that strategy.

Bamboo Shutters and Shaded Terraces

Folding and sliding bamboo shutters are the house's adjustable skin. Pulled open, they turn a room into a covered terrace; closed, they become a textured panel that catches tree shadows on an otherwise plain plaster facade. The choice of cane over aluminum louvres is telling. It keeps the vocabulary close to rural Cypriot building without resorting to pastiche.

The terraces themselves are furnished simply, with timber armchairs over gravel. You get the sense that the architects designed for afternoons, when the court is too bright and shade becomes the most valuable room in the house.

Living Rooms That Face Inward

The living spaces turn their backs to the road and their faces to the court. Floor-to-ceiling sliding doors make the threshold almost disappear, and at dusk the olive tree outside becomes the focal point of the room. A plywood shelving unit carries storage along the solid walls, leaving the glazed side free.

This is where the multi-generational brief earns its keep. A shared living room opening onto a shared court lets grandparents, parents and children occupy the same space at different intensities, inside, on the threshold or out by the pool, without anyone needing to leave the group.

Plywood, Steel and Raw Concrete

The material palette is restrained and tactile. The kitchen is built in plywood with a steel backsplash that curves into an arch, a playful echo of traditional openings rendered in industrial material. A green pendant adds one note of color. It reads as a summer kitchen: easy to clean, easy to live with, unfussy.

Upstairs, the bedroom towers carry the same logic. A raised sleeping platform, plywood shutters and a steel pole with netting sit beneath an exposed concrete ceiling, with a window framing the sunlit field. These rooms feel closer to cabins than suites, which suits a house built for seasonal use.

Terrazzo with Marble Inlays

The floors deserve a closer look. A terrazzo ground is punctuated by inlays of pink and white marble, round in one place, rectangular in another. It is a small gesture with real character, giving the continuous floor a sense of place markers, almost like stepping stones through the interior.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the organization legible. The ground floor plan shows rooms wrapped around the hexagonal court with the round pool, a carport and garden trees, while the upper floor plan isolates the two bedroom volumes on opposite corners. Sections cut through the towers and the slightly sunken court, and the elevations reveal how closed the street faces are compared with the perforated courtyard side.

The five-step diagram is the most useful drawing of the set. It traces a semi-detached plot being carved into a central courtyard, then overlays a sun path and cross ventilation. It frames the form as a response to climate and plot, not a stylistic choice.

Why This Project Matters

Much contemporary housing on Cyprus, especially holiday housing, faces outward: big glass to the view, a pool on display, little shade. The Avlí Houses argues for the opposite. By closing the perimeter and opening the center, Ona i Ona recovers the courtyard type's core virtues of privacy, microclimate and shared outdoor life, and adapts them to a family that spans several generations.

What we value most is the discipline. The hexagonal court, the round pool and the two towers are the only big moves; everything else is plaster, plywood, bamboo and concrete handled with care. At 220 m², it shows that a regional type can be updated without inflating it, and that a summer house can be generous without being large.

The Avlí Houses by Ona i Ona Architecture and Design (lead architects Eleni Flouri and Laoura Maria Fotiou), Paralimni, Cyprus. Area: 220 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Creative Photo Room, Maria Efthymiou.

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