Building a stone villa

Bodrum limestone runs from warm beige through honey into pale sand. That range is not chosen afterwards. It is already there when the wall goes up. Inside, lime plaster taken to ivory or off-white does not fight the light coming off the stone. Oak stays unpainted, in the shutter and in the ceiling. Linen is kept neutral, because if the cloth is allowed to set the colour it pushes back the tone the wall has already established.

A façade pulled to white, a wall dressed in dark glass, or a cladding of imported white marble separates the stone from the ground it stands on. Indoors there is no need for a second scheme. The room continues in the same stone and the same plaster.

Bodrum lies near 37° north. At noon in June the sun is overhead, and glass facing south can be shaded by a horizontal overhang whose depth is calculated from the height of that glass. Giving every window the same overhang does not stand in for the calculation. The depth changes with the size of the opening.

On the west the light drops toward evening. A horizontal overhang no longer holds a shadow at that hour, so the glass is made smaller and a vertical oak shutter is set in front of it. The whole façade does not need to become glass in order to admit the sea. A single opening under the overhang already frames the view. Applying the stone as a tile of about twenty millimetres is the same kind of error. Heat is held by the mass of the wall, not by the thickness of a facing.

If an olive stands on the land, the tree is not cut. Levels and the approach of the house are set from it, because the tree has already established its shade and its place. Maquis, thyme and lavender are the plants of this ground. A lawn asks for an irrigation regime of its own through a Bodrum summer, and it does not belong here. Gravel and stone cover the soil.

Where water is wanted, it is taken into the shade of the court as a narrow basin. A broad pool open to the west throws the afternoon sun onto the glass, so the water stays inside the court rather than at the western edge of the view.

In the Aegean the summer meltem blows largely from the north, and Bodrum’s north shore receives it directly. A slope that faces south stays warmer. The breeze reaches it only after crossing the ridge, and it arrives weaker. To carry a façade resolved for the north shore onto that slope is to ignore that one peninsula holds two different sites.

Thick stone lets the heat of the day into the room only slowly. At night, once the shutters are open and the windows opposite one another stand ajar, that heat can leave. Coolness does not come from a façade that merely looks composed. The mass of the stone delays the heat, and the air taken in at night carries it out.

The house is entered from the top of the slope, on the side away from the view. The car and the service rooms stay on that level, and the side that is looked toward is left clear. Living turns to the court and to a south opening whose shade has been calculated. Bedrooms remain on the quieter wing. Windows set opposite one another keep open the path by which the day’s heat leaves at night.

Bathrooms and the working side of the kitchen sit near the entrance. Water stays in a narrow basin in the shade of the court. A wide pool open to the west throws the afternoon sun back onto the glass, so the water belongs in the court, not at the western end of the view.

Waterproofing of the roof and the wet rooms is not put off because the summer is dry. In Bodrum the rain comes in winter. Water running down the slope, if it is let into the court, turns toward the front of the house and, in time, inside it. A stone channel keeps that fall away from the building.

Bare steel on a fixing that faces the sea rusts quickly in salt air. Stainless steel or painted aluminium takes its place. The overhang cuts the south glass, and the glass itself should admit little heat. On the west the opening stays small. A cement plaster that cannot breathe, spread over the limestone, leaves moisture and salt inside the wall.