On the outskirts of Nicosia, Cyprus, at the edge of a sparse forest, Studio Kyriakos Miltiadou has created a house that overturns the conventions of residential design open to the landscape, instead probing the idea of an inscrutable, introverted, and almost “bare-bones” living box.

Deliberately adopting an ambiguous stance, the building stands out in its surroundings with the unusual presence of a sculpture or an unidentified container: the more massive and impenetrable it appears from the outside, the more it disintegrates inside into a complex interplay of fragmentations and volumetric erosions with a vaguely deconstructivist feel, articulating a living space that is protective yet richly layered and immersive.

A three-dimensional grid of beams and pillars structures and punctuates the house, supporting a monolithic exposed-concrete shell measuring 14 by 17 meters, interrupted only by gaps that break the continuity of the façades and selectively frame the landscape. Like a set of Chinese boxes, the outer shell contains a second cubic volume that houses the domestic spaces and, as if driven by a process of self-erosion, breaks apart into a complex aggregation of prismatic forms, establishing a tight dialectic between the building’s solid masses and the voids of passageways and planted courtyards.

Here is an optimized, clearer, and more fluid versioOn the eastern side, a vertical slit in the wall dramatizes the “ceremonial” transition from exterior to interior, leading to an open-air garden that becomes the hub around which the rituals of daily life unfold across different levels: the common areas (kitchen, dining room, and living room) on the ground floor, and the sleeping quarters on the two upper levels. At the top, a panoramic terrace reached by an external staircase dissolves the blue-painted roof into the sky.

The slender, essential rooms—radiant with light that reverberates across the pale, tactile surfaces and sparsely furnished—clearly reveal the construction hierarchy, embracing a seamless interpenetration of architecture and structure, form and function. Over time, as the climbing vegetation fills the courtyards and passageways, it will envelop the house like a “third box,” gradually softening its formal rigor.