Stone Villas in North-East Corfu

We build stone villas in north-east Corfu, both load-bearing houses, where the wall carries the roof, and stone-faced houses, where a stone skin sits over a structural frame. The two are not the same thing, and we will tell you which one you are buying. Most of our villa work sits on a slope, so the house and its retaining are read as a single move from the first drawing.

Load-bearing means the stone itself does the work. The wall is built in two faces with a hearting of smaller stone packed tight between them, bonded with breathable lime mortar, and tied across its thickness with through-stones at regular courses so the two faces act as one. Openings are framed with dressed quoins and turned with a true arch of cut voussoirs, not a hidden concrete lintel wearing a stone face. On headland sites we set Sinies limestone into the rock itself and let the wall thickness carry the loads, which is why the rooms hold their temperature through a Corfu August.

A stone-faced house is an honest thing too, and often the right call where spans, budget or seismic detailing ask for a frame. Here the stone is a cladding, a real one, hand-laid, not a thin tile, bonded back to the structure and pointed in lime so the face still breathes. On a hillside plot the cladding and the retaining wall below it are built as one continuous piece of stonework, so the house grows out of the hillside rather than perching on it. What we will not do is pass a clad wall off as a solid one. You should know what is holding your house up.

Why stone at all, when block is faster. Sinies limestone from Mount Pantokrator has clad this island's buildings since the 1660s, the Lodge of the Nobles, now the Town Hall, is the same stone, and it weathers into the landscape instead of fighting it. Laid in lime rather than cement, the wall lets moisture move out instead of trapping it against the structure. A stone villa built this way is heavier, slower and quieter, and it is meant to stand for generations.