React Architects Carve an Inhabitable Landscape into a Cycladic Hillside on Paros

On a hill above Kostos on the island of Paros, a mountain path winds through olive groves where goats and donkeys still set the pace. It is precisely this path, and the terrain it follows, that gave React Architects their organizing principle for LofoS Residence. Rather than planting a villa on top of the slope, lead architects Natasha Deliyianni and Yiorgos Spiridonos chose to grow one out of it: 280 square meters of living space conceived as earthwork, where rooftops become gardens, walls become retaining edges, and the distinction between built form and ground simply ceases to apply.

What makes LofoS genuinely interesting is not the white plaster, which is standard Cycladic vocabulary, but the refusal to treat landscape as decoration applied after the architecture is done. Eva Papadimitriou's landscape design is co-authored with the building itself; planted roofs cascade down the hill, a guest house sits in an adjacent plot connected by the same continuous terrain, and the pool nestles into a courtyard that reads as a natural depression. The project, nominated for the 2026 Mies van der Rohe Award, proposes that the most radical thing you can do on a Greek island hillside is not to stand out from it.

Architecture as Topography

Seen from a distance, LofoS reads less as a house and more as a cluster of white forms that could be geological outcrops or agricultural terraces. The massing fragments into several low volumes that step down the hillside, respecting the existing contour lines rather than cutting a flat platform into the slope. Stone walls from the surrounding terraced fields find a visual echo in the building's horizontal lines. The decision to stay low, to spread rather than stack, means the residence never breaks the ridgeline against the sky.

From the aerial vantage, the planted roofs confirm the intention: the building gives back to the landscape what it took during construction. Gravel, native grasses, and succulents colonize the roof surfaces, making the architecture increasingly invisible as it matures. The orientation faces east toward Naxos, which means every primary living space catches the morning light and the evening silhouette of the neighboring island becomes a permanent backdrop.

The Roofscape as Living Room

React Architects treat the roof not as a leftover surface but as the project's most generous public space. White plastered parapets double as built-in seating, curved planters hold drought-resistant species, and the views toward the mountain ridgelines are framed with the precision of a camera lens. There is a deliberate looseness to the layout: corners round off, edges thicken into benches, and the line between parapet and planter blurs. The rooftop terrace extending toward the sea, with its cactus silhouettes against the horizon, has the quality of a Mediterranean belvedere that happens to sit on top of a house.

The strategy also has a practical dimension. Accessible rooftops on a hillside site allow every level of the house to connect directly to an outdoor surface at grade. You never climb stairs to reach the outdoors; you simply step out onto whatever piece of ground your room touches. That continuity between interior and exterior is the project's most effective spatial trick.

Thresholds and Passages

Circulation in LofoS is cinematic. Exterior staircases emerge from groundcover planting, framed by white rendered walls that compress the view before releasing it. The terrazzo staircase descending between walls, with a slice of coastal landscape visible at the bottom, is a classic sequence of compression and release that architects have used since the Acropolis. But here the effect feels unforced, almost incidental, as though the path simply carved itself between the volumes.

The entry at dusk, with its terracotta pot flanked by cactus and cypress, sets the tone for the entire experience: vernacular elements composed with contemporary restraint. There are no grand gestures at the front door, just a quiet transition from the mountain path into domestic space. The fact that the plot is bordered by a route still used by animals gives this threshold a particular poignancy: you arrive at the house the same way the goats do.

White Volumes at Twilight

At dusk, the house reveals a second personality. Uplighting catches the underside of cypress canopies and the soft curves of the white walls, turning the complex into something theatrical. The overlapping rooflines cascading down the hillside read as a small settlement rather than a single residence, which is exactly the right reading for a Cycladic context where villages have always been aggregations of small volumes rather than singular gestures.

The presence of cypress trees, planted close to the building, introduces vertical counterpoints to the relentless horizontality. Their dark columnar forms punctuate the white surfaces and will, over time, soften the edges of the architecture further. React Architects clearly understand that a building on Paros is never finished when the contractor leaves; it is finished when the landscape reclaims it.

Interior Warmth Against Cycladic White

Inside, the material palette shifts decisively. Polished terrazzo floors in warm tones lead down to dining spaces where a timber table sits beneath woven pendant lights, and the kitchen features a generous timber island under board-formed concrete ceilings. The choice of wood, supplied by Kritikos Wood, introduces a tactile warmth that the exterior deliberately withholds. The board-formed concrete overhead is left raw, its grain visible, establishing a dialogue between craft and mass that keeps the interiors from feeling precious.

The infinity pool, positioned at the building's lowest terrace, extends the material language of polished stone into the landscape. Loungers and native grasses share the deck, and the view drops away toward the sloping terrain below. It is a restrained composition that avoids the resort-brochure cliché: no vanishing edge toward the sea, just a quiet stretch of water held within the hillside.

Aerial Legibility

Drone photography reveals the project's organizational logic most clearly. The angular white roofscape, with its central courtyard pool and surrounding olive groves, reads as a topographic map made real. Courtyards, timber decks, and gravel beds alternate across the roof surfaces, creating a patchwork of microclimates and uses. The guest house, visible in the adjacent lot, extends the composition without duplicating it, suggesting that the landscape strategy could absorb additional program over time.

From above, the green roofs are not afterthoughts but the primary surface of the building. They connect visually to the surrounding planted beds, making it difficult to tell where the building's footprint begins and the garden ends. That ambiguity is the project's central thesis, and the aerial views are its clearest proof.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan reveals a curving footprint that wraps around the pool courtyard, with rooms fanning out along the slope rather than stacking vertically. The curved geometry is not arbitrary: it follows the natural contour of the hill, minimizing excavation and keeping each room close to the ground plane. The sections are particularly revealing. They show how the residence embeds itself into the slope, with the exterior stair ascending from the lowest level to the rooftop gardens above. The figures drawn into the sections give a sense of the modest ceiling heights, which keep the volumes subordinate to the landscape. The elevations confirm the deliberate horizontality: even the tallest wall barely exceeds two stories, and the planted trees in front will eventually screen much of it from view.

Why This Project Matters

The Cyclades face an architectural crisis of taste. Instagram has turned the whitewashed cube into a branding exercise, and luxury villas on Paros and Mykonos increasingly treat the landscape as a stage set for infinity pools. LofoS pushes back against that tendency without retreating into nostalgia. It uses the local vocabulary of white plaster, stone terraces, and clustered volumes, but reorganizes them around a landscape-first logic that is genuinely contemporary. The nomination for the 2026 Mies van der Rohe Award suggests that this approach has caught the attention of jurors looking for alternatives to spectacle.

React Architects have demonstrated that the most compelling move on a Mediterranean hillside is not to dominate it but to become part of it. The project's real achievement is temporal: as the planted roofs thicken, as the cypress trees mature, as the native grasses fill in around the terrazzo stairs, LofoS will become progressively less visible and progressively more alive. That is a rare thing in residential architecture, where permanence and photogenic clarity usually win out over ecological patience.

LofoS Residence by React Architects (Natasha Deliyianni, Yiorgos Spiridonos), Kostos, Paros, Greece. 280 m², completed 2024. Landscape architecture by Eva Papadimitriou (Outside). Photography by Panagiotis Voumvakis.

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