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Sigurd Larsen turns one Kythnos terrace into a pared-back retreat where cooking, sleeping, and day-dreaming all happen in the open air.
A narrow track winds up the stony slopes of Kythnos, and at the crest—just as the Aegean opens into a sweep of blue—The Outdoor House appears like a pause in the landscape. Designed by Berlin-based Sigurd Larsen for the owners of the nearby Piperi House, the 90-square-meter retreat (20 m² stone guest room, 70 m² timber-topped pergola) is less a building than an inhabitable terrace. Two rough-hewn walls of local schist frame the view, guide the breeze, and cradle a floor of island slate. Between them, Larsen has slipped a gridded timber roof of chestnut poles and woven reed: dense enough to scatter the Cycladic sun, porous enough to let the meltemi winds slide through, and open enough at night for Orion to steal the show.
Everything here asks you to live outdoors. A stone counter holds a gas hob and deep sink for dinners cooked under gull cries; a long wood table rides on discreet wheels, ready to chase shade; mattresses and marble off-cuts become daybeds and side tables that migrate with the light. Even the shower stands under open sky, a black column set against a drystone enclosure so you can rinse off salt with the scent of thyme in the air. When weather turns, a single white-washed room—bed, desk, compact loo—waits behind thick shutters; it is the only heated space on site, a reminder that shelter matters precisely because life is lived beyond it.
By nesting the project inside an existing hillside terrace, Larsen borrowed the work of long-gone farmers—dry-stacked retaining walls, narrow goat paths, the rhythm of olive and fig—and let the new slip between. No grout masks the stone, no paint hides its geology; instead, lime mortar and pale terrazzo floors strike a quiet pact with the rock. The result is an architecture that feels found as much as made: a place where the horizon is a moving wall, where summer nights echo with cicadas, and where the most memorable room has no walls at all.
