Stonework in Kassiopi, Corfu

Kassiopi sits where Corfu's north-east coast turns hard rock to the sea. Here we build load-bearing stone villas set into the headlands, walls that hold the slope as well as the roof, and dressed Sinies limestone worked close to the water. The ground dictates the work, and the work answers to the ground.

The Kassiopi headlands are steep, exposed and built on the same limestone we cut into. That suits the way we prefer to work: a villa faced and structured in stone as a single move, so the wall that faces the Ionian is also the wall that carries the load. On a headland plot that means setting the building into the rock above the water in Sinies limestone from Mount Pantokrator, the same stone that has clad Corfu's Lodge of the Nobles since the 1660s, laid with proper hearting and through-stones, not a thin skin over blockwork.

This corridor of the north-east coast asks for two things at once: a house that stands and ground that stays. Where a villa meets a slope we batter the retaining wall, set the quoins true, and tie the structure back with through-stones so the hillside and the building read as one piece of work. Sinies limestone takes a dressed face for steps, coping and openings; local fieldstone does the patient structural work of holding a terrace. We choose by what the wall has to do, not by what looks tidiest in a photograph.

What suits Kassiopi is plain, load-bearing stonework: villas where the stone is the structure, retaining walls that carry the headland, and dressed limestone for steps, copings and arches down to the sea. Where there is old fabric to keep, we repoint and rebuild in lime mortar, which breathes where cement traps damp. None of it is decoration bolted on at the end. It is the building, in stone, doing its job.