House on the Aegean Sea

Located on a steep terrain, the single family house by Studio Erdil İnşaat on the Egean Sea maximizes space with a cantilever that allows for panoramic views, a swimming pool, terraces and gardens.

Erdil İnşaat, Ma Vie La, single family house on the Egean Sea, Çeşme, Turkey, 2015

Studio Erdil İnşaat designed a single family house on the Egean Sea, with half of the visible structure cantilevered by eight meters. The structure is a 16 meter long by 7.5 meter wide concrete box with no columns or beams. The 520 square meters land hosts this very large house that only has a 64 square meters footprint.

With a minimalist approach, there were used five main materials: concrete, steel, stone, wood and glass, with the ambition to make as much use of the land as possible, while creating a variety of wide and open spaces that could be used depending on the wind and weather conditions.

The folding/sliding window and door systems, the eight meters long cantilever and the pool placement on the side of the house are all design decisions to maximize the living areas. The folding systems make convertible living spaces to switch between indoor and outdoor, while the cantilever also serves to push the building mass toward the sea view, clearing the adjacent house, to create a large roadside terrace and to provide plenty of shade by the pool and garden.

The steep grade of the land would have created very large, long, narrow and unusable side gardens terminated by very tall retaining walls. For this reason the design team decided to use the building’s side facade and the retaining walls bordering the property as a pool basin, connecting the ends with an L shaped wall, giving space to a very large pool and a sizable garden.

The building facade in raw concrete also makes up the load bearing structure, cast in a textured wooden formwork. The shutters are made from wood, the exterior flooring in stone, the interior flooring in marble and the private spaces have rustic oak wood. The landscaping was designed with local plants such as olive, mastic and cypress trees in corten steel clad concrete planters, all irrigated with an 80 metric ton cistern that collects rain water year-round.