MOLD Architects Punches Seven Courtyards Into a Pink Serifos House

Seven irregular openings cut through the terracotta-toned roof of M Residence, a completed house in Lia on the Greek island of Serifos, overlooking the Aegean Sea. Athens-based MOLD Architects designed the building, and those roof cuts aren't gestures alone — they're courtyards pulled inside the footprint.

The house solves a familiar problem for scenic homes: how to open up without exposing everything. Rooms at M Residence get gardens and daylight through the internal courtyards while the perimeter walls stay intact. From outside, the building reads as one reserved block. From above, it looks like someone took a cookie cutter to the slab.

How does the house actually work?

Curved walls guide movement between rooms and planted pockets inside the strict square perimeter. The architects drew on local monasteries, the cubic buildings of island villages, and the softer contours of rural structures and dry-stone walls. Views appear through openings in sequence rather than arriving all at once.

Color carries weight here. Earthy pink plaster runs across walls and ceilings, holding the spaces together where the geometry gets complicated. Against Serifos's dry terrain, the warm shade reads less like a pristine object dropped onto a hillside — and it gives the deep shadows under the roof edges a richness that the dominant crisp-white vacation-house finish would handle very differently.

Perforated brick screens interrupt the solid walls with a finer grid. The kitchen offers a different frame: pale wood cabinetry and a broad window facing the water. In Giorgos Sfakianakis's photographs, a counter extends along that view with stools tucked beneath it. The sea becomes part of an ordinary place to sit, not a spectacle reserved for the living room.

Why did it take more than a decade to build?

MOLD founder Iliana Kerestetzi first developed the design in 2011, and it sat unbuilt for over ten years. New owners later revived the project, and the studio revisited the scheme — opening rooms more generously toward the courtyards and warming the material palette. A drawing can carry a strong identity and still need edits before it becomes someone's everyday surroundings.

Outside, the volume rests on a raised plinth, producing a narrow shadow line beneath its edges. A rectangular swimming pool sits beyond the main square. The hovering effect is theatrical, but the courtyards make the stronger case: they give the sculptural ambition a purpose at room level.

What does this change for how we build view houses?

The project suggests an alternative to the floor-to-ceiling panorama as the default answer. Sometimes you want the sea; sometimes you want a patch of sky and a little separation. There's an honest limit, though — the photographs show sheltered corners, planting and generous openings, but they don't establish how the house performs through a hot summer or how the courtyards handle changing weather.

The telling detail came after the drawings. According to Kerestetzi, the residents hung white fabric beneath one roof opening to filter the light — a softness the studio never specified. A house this carefully composed could easily look too precious to touch. A piece of hung fabric says someone is already making it a home.