The idyllic Costa Navarino estate in the Peloponnese has long been a coveted destination for the archetypal Greek summer offering – sun, sea, good food and carefree sunsets – mixed with the finest contemporary luxury and a design-led attitude. Now, the resort, known for hospitality venues such as the Westin Resort and The Romanos, a Luxury Collection Resort, is seeing the completion of its very first private residences – a family of some 20 homes that will create a serene, architectural neighbourhood engulfed in a natural landscape of Mediterranean plants, sand dunes and olive groves. The featured villa, created by Athens architecture studio ISV with interiors by K-Studio, is one of the first to complete within the Costa Navarino Residences site.
Beachfront location? Check. Sleek, contemporary architecture infused with notes from the local vernacular of stone and minimalist architecture forms? Check. The home is part of Sea Dunes, one of three ‘neighbourhoods’ of residences here, the other two being Rolling Greens, and Olive Grove. All are within walking distance of the beach, and offer their private residents access to various of the resort's amenities, as well as the Owners' Club, which aims to create a strong sense of community among tenants.
The architecture team worked hard at interpreting the context's nature and lifestyle offering into design terms, in a whole that feels modern but also appropriate for its location. ‘Our proposal for the Costa Navarino Residences is a celebration of in-between space. During the summer, external space tends to be uncomfortably hot and exposed, but retreating to the cooler, darker internal space usually disconnects you entirely from the beauty of the natural environment.
'We wanted to create an unfolded, permeable architecture that lies on the threshold between these two extremes,' say K-Studio's Dimitris and Konstantinos Karambatakis (the practice formed part of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory in 2012).
Sustainability was a key element to consider too, and the architects worked with local materials and low-tech solutions to minimise the project's environmental impact. Careful management of shading and insulation (such as the wall thicknesses) added to the effective and natural tackling of the hot Greek summer, supporting a lower carbon footprint for the building.
ISV Architects, headed by co-founders Babis Ioannou, Tasos Sotiropoulos and Alexander Van Gilder, adds: ‘The specific landscape of Navarino Dunes is the main inspiration. The wind, the waves, the horizontal line on the end of the sea, the authentic nature with the dunes, and the light, draw the designer’s pencil. The challenge was to work with the local materials, creating a unique, quite modern result, fully integrated in the environment.'
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