Stonework in Barbati, Corfu

Barbati climbs steeply from a shingle bay into dense olive and cypress, and almost nothing here sits on flat ground. We build on that hillside the way the land asks for: the villa and the wall that holds its plot are cut and laid as one move, so the retaining and the house read as a single piece of stone rather than a building propped above a slope.

The terrain sets the order of work. Before a wall comes up, the slope is read for where it wants to shed water and where it wants to give way, and the retaining is battered back into the hill with a deep hearting of packed stone behind the face. Through-stones tie front to back so the wall carries the load of the bank above it, not just its own weight. Only once that ground is held do the villa walls rise off it, quoins squared at the corners, openings spanned and trued, the coping run level along the top so rain runs off the slope and not into the joints.

The character of the work here is a stone-faced villa and its retaining built together as one move, in local fieldstone gathered to the warm greys and ochres of the hill itself. Where a build wants a finer, dressed face, steps, coping, a clean reveal, we bring in Sinies limestone from Mount Pantokrator, the same stone that has clad Corfu's old Lodge of the Nobles since the 1660s.

For Barbati that means two services nearly always travel together: Stone Villas and Retaining & Structural Walls. On a slope this steep they are not separable jobs. The wall is structural before it is anything else, and the villa is only as sound as the ground it stands on, so we quote, set out and build them as the single problem they actually are.