Stonework in Sinies, Corfu

Sinies is the high north-east shoulder of Corfu, where Mount Pantokrator drops through olive and cypress to the Ionian. We build load-bearing villas, retaining walls and dressed steps here in the stone the ground gives up, Sinies limestone, the same pale, close-grained rock that has faced Corfu Town since the seventeenth century.

This is the source. Sinies limestone, cut from the Pantokrator massif, has clad the Lodge of the Nobles, now Corfu Town Hall, since the 1660s. It dresses cleanly into quoins and voussoirs, takes a sharp arris, and weathers to a quiet honey-grey that the cement renders of the last fifty years have never matched. Working in Sinies means working at the quarry's doorstep, with the rock the masons of the Venetian town once carried south by boat.

The terrain sets the brief. These are steep, terraced slopes, and almost every build here is two problems at once, a wall that holds the hillside and a wall you live behind. We batter retaining walls back into the slope with a graded hearting and the long through-stones that tie a dry face to the bank, then face a villa in the same Sinies stone above it, so the cut and the structure read as one move rather than a veneer hung on a frame.

What suits Sinies is dressed, load-bearing limestone work: stone villas set into the contour, structural retaining, steps and coping run down toward the water. Where an older house survives, lime mortar is the only honest choice, it breathes with the wall and lets the damp out, where cement traps it and spalls the face. We point and rebuild in lime and Sinies, the materials the place was made from.