Design visualisation
Private Villa, Athens
A new three-level house on a walled site in Voula, south of Athens, designed by Habitat from the boundary wall inward. Behind the gates there is a formal entry and main stair, a dining room and bar, a library and cinema, two kitchens, a home office, a wellness centre with a pool and gym, a master suite with its own dressing and bathing rooms, guest suites and outdoor entertaining. One design covers all of it.
Cars come in under the house, past a ring of falling water around a single tree, and the front door is at the back of that space rather than on the street.
Inside, the hall is lined in travertine with bronze set into the wall recesses, and the stair is a bronze drum wrapped in fluted glass. Its treads are a veined red stone that comes back later in the bar and the powder room.
Dining sits in a glazed room off the garden, with the fire set into a wall of Calacatta and a rippled plaster ceiling above the table.
Two doors away, the bar is the one room in the house that goes dark: red stone shelves, a brushed-steel bar front, woven bronze mesh on the walls and a black terrazzo floor. Same house, different rules.
The wellness centre takes up the lower level: a pool under a row of travertine arches, lit from slots in the roof, with the gym and treatment rooms opening off it.
Underneath the formal rooms it is still a family house. The main kitchen is a long island in Calacatta viola under a curved timber ceiling, with a chef’s kitchen behind it so the one you see stays clear when the house is full.
The living room opens to the internal garden through a curved wall of glass.
The master suite runs as one sequence: a timber-lined bedroom with a fire built into a travertine column, a dressing room with its own island and lighting, and a bathing room where the tub is a single block of Calacatta viola under an arch.
The powder room is the smallest room in the house and the only one, apart from the bar, in the dark red stone.
Planning a private residence?
Habitat is a Sydney studio that designs houses whole: the building and the interiors, by one team, from the first sketch to the joinery drawings the builder works from.
We take on a small number of private residences each year, in Australia and overseas. If you have a site, or a house that needs to become a different house, tell us about it.
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