React Architects Breaks a Paros Hilltop House into Stone and White Volumes Beside a Mycenaean Signal Tower

Most new houses on Paros face the same problem: how to place a contemporary programme on an island whose landscape is defined by low stone walls, terraced fields and small white buildings, without dropping a single bright block onto the hillside. With Triangle House, also called ysterni triangle, React Architects answers by refusing to build one building at all. Lead architects Natasha Deliyianni and Yiorgos Spiridonos took what could have been one 274 m² volume and split it into several smaller ones. A courtyard then pulls them back together into a single residential complex on the hill of Ysterni. The house was completed in 2019.

The siting is what we find most interesting. The hill holds the remains of the Vigla phryktoria of Ysterni, a Mycenaean-era signal tower. It was one of eleven such posts in a fire-signalling network that ran from Tinos toward Asia Minor. The architects say they positioned the residence according to the planning logic of those phryktories. That is an unusual brief for a holiday house. It treats the site less as a view to capture and more as a node in a very old system of sightlines. The fragmentation of the house follows from that idea: a scattered cluster sits more quietly in that history than a single object would.

A Cluster Read from Above

The aerials show the strategy most clearly. Seen from above, the house barely reads as a house. It is a set of stone-walled rooms and courts sitting inside a walled plot of terraced fields. Only one angled white roof and a rectangle of pool water make it clearly contemporary. One roof is covered in pebbles, another is clad in stone. Both choices let the fifth elevation blend into the dry ground around it.

At dusk the stepped roofs and small path lights trace the circulation between volumes. They make plain that this is a place you move through outdoors, crossing open ground between rooms rather than walking down a corridor.

Dry Stone Against White Render

The material palette is a dialogue between two Cycladic languages. One is the rough dry stone wall of the agricultural landscape. The other is the smooth white render of the island's villages. React does not blend them. A freestanding stone wall slides past a white rendered plane at the glazed entrance, and the joint between the two is left legible.

The recessed white entry set into a stone mass is a small but telling move. Here the stone reads as ground and enclosure, while the white reads as inhabitation. Concrete stepping pads over gravel keep the paving light, so the hardscape never competes with the walls.

Shrinking the Apparent Volume

The stated aim of breaking up the building is to adapt it to the landscape and reduce how big it appears. From the ground the approach works. A low stone volume with a single small square window sits among olive trees and grasses like a field shelter. A long stone wall with a dark doorway could pass for a boundary wall until you notice the opening.

This is where the project is most disciplined. Paros has plenty of houses that use stone cladding as a veneer over a large box. Here the size of each piece is held down, so the stone describes real volumes at agricultural scale rather than a cladding pattern.

Pool, Pavilion and the Horizon Line

The white pavilion is the one element allowed to step forward. Its sliding glass doors open onto a dark-tiled pool that reflects the facade and the sky. A long lap pool with built-in steps runs along a pale concrete terrace, a hard horizontal datum against the soft, irregular stone around it.

At dusk the pavilion lights up behind planted terrace walls. It is the most conventional image in the set, and also proof that the cluster can host the expected comforts of an island holiday house without losing its restraint.

Shade as Architecture

In the Cyclades, outdoor rooms only work if they are shaded, and the white louvered pergolas do much of that work here. Seen from above, the slats cast stripes across stone and gravel, a crisp, measured layer laid over the irregular masonry.

Under the louvers, built-in cushioned benches back onto dry stone walls, so the wall becomes furniture. Pink sofas and red chairs add colour that the stone and render leave room for. The terraces feel like rooms you would actually spend a long afternoon in.

Openings That Frame the Island

Where the walls open, they open on purpose. A floor-to-ceiling glazed opening frames an olive tree in a planted courtyard. A stone-framed terrace opening looks past flowering shrubs toward a distant hill and the sea. An angled stone wall pulls back to reveal a white porch beside a gnarled olive trunk.

Each of these frames keeps the view selective and close. Rather than a continuous glass front aimed at the Aegean, the house gives you a sequence of edited views, which fits a project that started from an ancient network of deliberate sightlines.

Why This Project Matters

Triangle House shows that fragmentation can be more than a stylistic tic when it is tied to the scale of the landscape. React Architects keeps each volume small enough to read as part of the island's agricultural fabric. It lets a courtyard, not a roof, hold the household together, and saves the white render for the few elements that carry daily life. The result is a 274 m² house that looks much smaller than it is.

The phryktoria reference deserves attention too. Few residential briefs start from an archaeological network, and the available material does not tell us exactly how that logic shaped the plan. Still, the idea of positioning a house within a historic system of sight, rather than simply toward the best view, is a useful prompt for anyone building on charged ground in the Mediterranean.

Triangle House (ysterni triangle) by React Architects, lead architects Natasha Deliyianni and Yiorgos Spiridonos. Isterni, Paros, Greece. Area: 274 m². Completed 2019. Photography by Panagiotis Voumvakis.

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