Stonework in Kalami, Corfu

In Kalami we work mostly on what is already here: Venetian-era houses and bay-side walls that were laid in lime long before cement arrived. The valley runs steep down to a tight cove, so the older buildings sit on terraced ground and dressed Sinies limestone. Our work here is restoration first, repointing, rebuilding, and keeping breathing walls breathing.

Kalami's older houses were built the slow way: rubble cores bound with lime mortar, quoins and openings dressed in Sinies limestone off Mount Pantokrator above. Where a previous repair smeared cement over those joints, the wall stopped breathing and the damp had nowhere to go but inward through the stone. The first job is usually undoing that, raking out hard cement, repointing in a lime mix that lets the wall dry, and resetting any face stones that have been pushed loose by trapped moisture.

Repointing and rebuilding a Venetian-era house means working in lime and Sinies throughout: matching the original bedding, picking up the existing coursing rather than imposing a new one, and cutting replacement stone to sit flush with what has weathered for three centuries. Where through-stones have failed we set new ones; where the coping has gone we recut it. The aim is that finished work reads as the same wall, only sound again.

If you have an older property above the bay, a house, a boundary wall, a flight of steps down toward the water, restoration and lime repointing are the services that suit Kalami. New build and retaining we do too, but here the value is usually in saving the fabric that's already standing: keeping the Sinies stone, keeping the lime, and keeping the wall doing the quiet structural work it was laid to do.