Terrain Made Inhabitable

MOLD Architects transforms a rocky Serifos hillside into Perma — a five-residence retreat built from the site's own excavated stone, where terrain and architecture become one.

The most interesting thing about Perma, the five-residence retreat completed by MOLD Architects on a rocky north-facing slope of Serifos in 2026, is that it asks a familiar question—how should architecture sit in a landscape?—and answers it with unusual literalness. Rather than importing materials and imposing form, the project begins with what was already there. Stone uncovered during excavation was reused throughout the development. Excavated earth was redistributed across a sequence of broad terraces. Floors and built-in furnishings were cast on site by local craftsmen. Rainwater is collected and reused for irrigation, while planted roofs support edible species. The result is a project that treats construction less as an act of replacement than one of rearrangement.

MOLD's founder, Iliana Kerestetzi, describes the approach as returning the site's own materials to the earth while creating inhabitable terrain. In another project, that kind of statement might read as sustainability rhetoric. Here, it functions more as a description of process. The architecture is assembled from the landscape's existing ingredients, and the landscape, in turn, is reshaped to accommodate living. Neither remains quite what it was before.

The framework that organizes this exchange is a concrete grid. Grids have a long architectural history as instruments of control, but Perma's is less interested in dominance than in calibration. It establishes relationships between things that might otherwise be experienced separately: a retaining wall and a view, a patch of vegetation and a shaded terrace, a roof garden and the horizon beyond it. The grid creates measure and orientation without insisting on uniformity. It gives the site structure while allowing its irregularities to remain visible.

"At Perma, the site's own materials are returned to the earth, creating an inhabitable landscape." — Iliana Kerestetzi, founder of MOLD Architects

That balance is most apparent in what the architects call "open rooms." These spaces are neither fully indoors nor conventionally outdoors. They are defined enough to feel inhabited yet permeable enough to remain connected to the surrounding environment. Light, air, shadow, and vegetation are treated as architectural elements rather than background conditions. A wall frames a view. A roof filters sunlight. A planted edge softens a threshold. Occupation happens not in opposition to the landscape but through continuous contact with it.

This distinction matters because Perma resists the object-building logic that characterizes so much contemporary residential architecture. It does not present itself as a singular form to be viewed from a distance. Instead, it unfolds through movement. The experience is one of passing between terraces, courtyards, shaded passages, and framed openings, each revealing a slightly different relationship to the sea, the sky, and the rocky terrain of the island. The architecture is less a figure in the landscape than a device for organizing encounters with it.

That approach feels particularly appropriate on Serifos. Among the Cycladic islands, it remains comparatively rugged and understated, less defined by tourism than by geology. Its steep slopes, exposed rock, and sparse vegetation give it a character that can seem resistant to domestication. Perma does not attempt to smooth away those qualities. Instead, it makes them more legible. By framing, editing, and inhabiting the terrain rather than transforming it, the project suggests a different model of luxury—one rooted not in separation from the landscape but in closer attention to it.

Key takeaways

• Perma is conceived as a measured piece of terrain made inhabitable rather than a building placed in a landscape — with stone sourced from the excavation itself, excavated material reused for terracing, floors and furnishings cast on site, rainwater collected for irrigation, and roofs planted with edible species, the architecture and the site are in complete material continuity.
• A concrete grid acts as the project's primary ordering device — not to impose abstraction but to hold together the site's existing elements of earth, water, stone, sunlight, reeds, and void, giving each material definition, scale, and proximity to the body without displacing any of them.
• The three-dimensional grid creates open rooms: protected, inward-facing spaces that remain visually connected to the Aegean, the sky, and the surrounding terrain, offering shelter without isolation and gathering light, shadow, air, and vegetation into intimate places of retreat within the larger Cycladic landscape.