Most people wouldn’t buy a home where they couldn’t close any of the windows or doors.
But when Piers Taylor, an architect based near Bath, England, started planning a second home for his family on the Greek island of Corfu, he tossed that humdrum convention overboard.
“When we were on holiday, I didn’t want it to be like home — I wanted it to feel completely different,” said Dr. Taylor, 57, the founder of the firm Invisible Studio. “More than anything, I wanted the house to feel really raw and really connected to this wild landscape, with no separation at all.”
The result is a hard-wearing home, built on a shoestring budget, that is impossible to close off from the elements. Its primary living space and kitchen is an open-air terrace under a corrugated metal roof. Its bedrooms and bathrooms, on two levels below the main living space, are dug into a hillside and can be only partially enclosed with metal screens and plastic curtains. There are no glass windows or doors, resulting in rooms that are forever exposed.
Dr. Taylor, who understands both frugality and extravagant design, having hosted the BBC shows “The House That £100k Built” and “The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes,” arrived at this radically minimalist concept after a lifetime of learning about Corfu’s natural environment and building traditions.
As a child, he spent long summers on Corfu with his parents, staying at a taverna on the beach where there was no electricity, and where they ate only what their hosts could catch or grow. When he started his own family, he introduced his wife, Sue Phillips, now 60, and their four children, now 14 to 34, to the island’s rustic pleasures.
“We went back, and back, and back again,” said Dr. Taylor, who has a Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at the University of Reading, in England. “It’s a place I feel incredibly connected to.”
For years, he had dreamed of building a house on the island. Lots on the water were out of reach, but he noticed that land in the hills cost far less. “Land on the water was five times the cost of land in the hills,” he said.
In 2014, he found a sunbaked, awkward lot of about one acre in a terraced olive grove for a relative bargain. “It was a scrappy piece of land with a very strange shape, and there wasn’t an obvious place to build something,” he said.
He and Ms. Phillips offered 50,000 euros (about $59,000), and the sellers accepted. Red tape dragged out the process for two years, but the couple finally closed on the property in 2016.
When he began designing the house, Dr. Taylor remembered his studies in Australia, where he had been inspired by the Australian architects Glenn Murcutt and Richard Leplastrier, who had both designed houses that opened wide to their natural settings, embracing the sun, plants and wind.
“Leplastrier lived in this extraordinary house north of Sydney with no glass,” Dr. Taylor said. “It was an incredibly primitive shack, with all these screens that opened up. I went there 27 years ago and was struck by its simplicity.”
Aiming to build something similarly unpretentious, but adapted to the materials and building methods typically used on Corfu, he began designing a 2,700-square-foot house on an extremely limited budget.
Made mostly from board-formed concrete, the home has no internal hallways or staircases — or wood or carpet. Exterior staircases and terraces provide access to one bedroom on the bottom level, three bedrooms and two bathrooms on the second level, and the living room and kitchen on top.
In the kitchen, more concrete creates a central island with a sink, an induction cooktop and undercounter refrigerators and freezers. Built-in concrete benches run from the cooking space into the living area.
Eliminating expensive elements like windows and doors, as well as premium interior finishes, kept costs down to about $175,000 over the two and a half years of construction, a fraction of what similarly sized homes usually cost.
The family began using the house last summer and has found it surprisingly comfortable, even liberating compared with an air-conditioned house sealed off from its surroundings.
“The kids all love it, and our friends all love it,” Dr. Taylor said, adding that shade from the roof and natural cross-ventilation keep the spaces cool, even on hot days, without using electricity.
The family uses insect screens over bedroom openings to keep bugs out. When they’re not at the house, they close the openings with galvanized metal mesh screens for security. “The driving rain will come through,” Dr. Taylor said. “But it doesn’t matter, because it’s set up to take that.”
Even if the family occasionally finds evidence that mountain goats have been in the kitchen, being so connected to the land is worth it. “The intensity of the light, the smells of the plants, the noise of the cicadas — it’s like everything is turned up to 11,” he said. “There’s something completely cathartic about being there.”
The post He Built a House With Doors and Windows That You Can’t Close appeared first on New York Times.
