Hourglass Corral:Ten Years of Walking

 DECA Architecture sinks a Voronoi-generated house into Milos — the final piece of a ten-year, five-corral territory built around intuition and haptic materials.

The architects of DECA Architecture began the Hourglass Corral the way they begin every project on the island of Milos: by walking. Not surveying, not photographing, not mapping in any conventional sense — walking, slowly, across the entire ninety-thousand-square-metre parcel on the Cycladic island, spending time in each place until they understood its particular quality of experience. "We were not trying to create a house to be inhabited," says founding partner Alexandros Vaitsos. "We were inhabiting the entire landscape." The topography was the brief. The genius loci was the programme.

What emerged from that decade-long process is not a single house but a territory — five corrals placed at five distinct points across the twenty-two-acre site, each serving a different purpose. The Immersion Corral, completed in 2012, is a two-bedroom cliffside dwelling with dramatic ocean views. The Orchard Corral contains twenty thousand square metres of productive olive trees — the largest grove on the island. A Preservation Corral is planted with fruit trees unique to Milos that are in danger of extinction. The Isolation Corral has no road access and was built by hand as a single room with a desk and a bed. The Hourglass Corral is the largest: a four-bedroom, three-thousand-square-foot house sunk beneath the ground plane, its tessellated form generated by the Voronoi diagram of 19th-century Russian mathematician Georgy Voronoy.

"We were not trying to create a house to be inhabited. We were inhabiting the entire landscape — feeling the vibe of each individual place." — Alexandros Vaitsos, DECA Architecture

The application of the diagram began not with mathematics but with sensation. DECA identified points on the site through intuition — a good spot for a tree, a place to put a table, a position for a bed facing a particular view. Those visceral, experiential points were then fed into the Voronoi formula, which generated an organic grid by calculating the maximum territory around each point relative to its neighbours. Each resulting cell corresponds to a defined programme: courtyard, canopy, communal space, bedroom. Each cell's roof is planted with a different species of aromatic plant from which essential oils can be extracted, the excavated earth reused to transform the landscape with minimal waste. At the centre of each cell, the ceiling folds upward to a custom operable skylight — part daylighting device, part passive cooling system, part industrial apparatus that, as Vaitsos notes, is central to the entire concept of the house.

Material selection followed the same haptic logic as the site analysis. Exposed concrete cantilevers dramatically from stone walls. Polished concrete, pronounced-grain wood cabinetry, and marble sinks carved from the same stone that lines the swimming pool were all chosen for how they feel in hand — the conviction, as founding partner Carlos Loperena puts it, that you know a material by how it makes you want to touch it.

The house that results does not impose. It merges, completely, with the landscape that ten years of walking produced.

Key takeaways

• DECA Architecture spent ten years developing five distinct corrals across a ninety-thousand-square-metre Milos property — cliffside dwelling, productive olive grove, preservation planting, a hand-built one-room Isolation Corral, and finally the Hourglass Corral — treating the entire landscape as the design project rather than approaching the house as an object placed within it.
• The Voronoi diagram, developed by 19th-century Russian mathematician Georgy Voronoy, was applied by first identifying experiential points on the site through pure intuition — spots for trees, tables, and beds — and then feeding those points into the formula to generate an organic cellular grid in which each cell corresponds to a specific programme and is planted with a different aromatic species on the green roof above it.
• Material selection across the Hourglass Corral was guided entirely by haptic quality — exposed concrete cantilevering from stone walls, polished concrete floors, pronounced-grain wood cabinetry, and marble sinks carved from the same stone lining the pool, all chosen because they make the viewer want to touch them, extending the project's fundamental logic of sensory engagement from site analysis to material palette.