The House That Held a Whole Life

There is a particular kind of client, in a city like Athens, whose life has been arranged by other people. Stefanos is one of them. He is the second generation of a shipping family whose name is known, in certain circles, on three continents. He had spent his adult life, by the time we met him, in rooms that had been specified for him — the glass tower in London, the airport lounge that is the same in every city, the Athens office his father had built and that Stefanos occupied, for twenty years, without changing the chairs.

He had never, in those twenty years, lived in a house that he had chosen. The Voula villa was to be the first.

## The inventory

The brief, when it arrived, read like an inventory because it was one. Six ensuite bedrooms, because the family was large and the guests were many. Two living rooms, because Stefanos's work life and his family life required separate stages. Two kitchens, because the family cooked seriously and the staff cooked separately. A pool. A panic room, with ventilation and emergency communication, because the shipping business, in certain years, requires one. An indoor basketball half-court, because Stefanos, who had been a serious junior player before his father's illness had called him into the company, had not played in twenty years and wanted, in his fifties, to play again. Parking for five vehicles. Sea views from every floor. Five levels, because the plot was small and the programme was large.

He handed us the inventory with the particular discomfort of a man who knows his life looks, on paper, absurd. "I know what it sounds like," he said. "I need all of it. I also need it not to feel like the list. Can you do that?"

## What the house could not be

The house could not be a fortress. It could not read, from the street, as a security installation with a pool attached. It could not read, from the inside, as a sequence of specialised rooms each sealed from the others. Stefanos had spent his life in sealed rooms — the office, the lounge, the back of the car — and the one thing the Voula villa could not be was another sealed room.

The house could not be a stage. Stefanos's father had built a stage — the great Athenian houses of the shipping generation had been stages, designed to be seen, to hold the particular performance of mid-century Greek commercial life. Stefanos, who had grown up on that stage, had no interest in returning to it.

## What we built

We built a house that stacks, honestly, down the Voula slope. The inventory is all there — the six bedrooms, the two living rooms, the two kitchens, the pool, the panic room, the basketball court, the parking for five — but it does not read as an inventory, because every level opens, through wide glass, to the sea. The principal living floor is the room the house turns on: two kitchens, indoor and outdoor dining, the barbecue, and the great veranda that holds the Saronic Gulf in a single wide frame. From that veranda, at any hour, you can see the water, and the water, in a house this complicated, is the thing that makes the complication bearable.

The materials are restrained. Teak floors, book-matched stone in the principal bathroom, brushed stainless and bronze in the fittings, white-rendered exterior walls. The panic room is invisible — integrated into the lower level, behind a book-matched stone wall in the family room, indistinguishable from a storage chase. The basketball court sits in the basement, beside the parking court, under the four-metre ceilings that the original spec had demanded for the cars and that we repurposed, with the client's delighted assent, for the court. The hoop, when it is not in use, folds against the wall. When it is in use, Stefanos, who had not played in twenty years, plays alone, in the early morning, before the family wakes.

## The morning he played

He called me, six months after he moved in, on a Monday. He had played basketball that morning, for the first time since he was eighteen. He had played for forty minutes, alone, in the basement, with the door to the parking court open so that the sea air came in. He had made, he said, eleven of twenty from the foul line, which was better than he had expected and worse than he had hoped. He had showered, and gone up to the principal living floor, and made coffee, and stood on the veranda, and looked at the Saronic Gulf, and understood, for the first time in his adult life, that he was in a house he had chosen.

"I have been in rooms my whole life that other people designed," he said. "This one — " he paused — "this one I designed. Not the drawings. The life. You drew the house. The life in it is the one I finally got to specify."

He had not, he told me, given up the glass towers or the airport lounges. The shipping business still required them. But the Voula villa was the place he returned to, and the return, after twenty years of rooms that were not his, had become the most important thing his life did.

A house is not, finally, a building. It is the one room in a life of rooms where the specification is your own.