Building Love In Tinos
INFUSING OLD HOMES WITH FRESH HEART, LIGHT, AND CREATIVITY
Construction chaos in Cozy
In March of 2018 our decade-long dream came true: we bought an old stone home with gorgeous Aegean views in Isternia, Tinos.
It has since been an intense chapter in our lives as we’ve renovated this property as well as others on the island. We have experimented throughout the process, sometimes failing miserably and sometimes winning big. We have incorporated as much of natural design and building as we felt appropriate and applicable.
We’ve given our all to these homes, and we believe it shows.
Our intention in renovating these spaces, beyond of course our own enjoyment of them, is to offer travelers to Tinos the deep spiritual and sensual medicine of lovingly restored, hand-built, heart-filled spaces.
Spaces where quality and detail were never sacrificed for the sake of time. Spaces where luxury was never measured by square footage and fancy appliances, but by small, idiosyncratic details that bring more consciousness and delight to one's day.
We hadn’t come all this way to make unimaginative spaces with unimaginative materials.
We wanted magic, and magic happened.
And it’s in in humble thanks to the MANY FELLOW BUILDER HANDS, SOME TRUE MASTERS AT THEIR CRAFT that these spaces have taken on such new life today.
COZY BEFORE:
We like to joke that we're house whisperers.
Whenever exploring buildings worn down by time, Nikiforos and I can instinctively see what magical new thing it could be. Almost always we come up with the same vision before even verbalizing it. (It’s one of our weird telepathic talents as a couple.)
It’s hard to define exactly why renovations excite us so much. It’s a physical project that surprisingly requires a real honing of intuition. It’s the practice of listening then responding, over and over and over again.
Then stone by stone, layer by layer, a dormant structure comes back to life. Light returns to dark rooms. Collapsed spaces regain strength. Walls breathe again.
And of course, we’ve grown immensely as individuals and as a couple, too.
We’ve had long days of doubt, frustration, tears, exhaustion, and overwhelm. But then there are the crowning days when a vision suddenly materializes, when something you’ve imagined for months (or years) finally exists in front of you.
Building has been a central way we’ve befriended Tinos itself.
By engaging directly with local materials and indigenous architecture, we’ve gained an embodied understanding of the island.
From the green marble of the northern quarries, to the softer sandstone of Isternia, to the rust-toned granite of Xinara, to the whiter marble of Triantaros—each stone reveals a key detail about the morphology and psyche of the land.
We’re also humbled by what these spaces have become beyond us. Hundreds of guests have made lifelong memories within these walls. That still amazes us.
EARTHY BEFORE:
When we began renovating the downstairs of the property—EARTHY—we quickly realized we were stepping into a much more technically demanding chapter of the journey.
Almost immediately upon purchasing the house, before even renovating upstairs, we uncovered a hidden room that had been completely buried. Uncovering it, clearing out years of debris, and slowly bringing it back into the home was long and often exhausting work (with the help of local mules, we are indebted to those animals).
Our suspicions were true—the arching protrusions in the plaster gave it away
From there, we had to fortify the original wall systems with a new archway, built with local marble. Outside, we reshaped the land itself, doing extensive landscaping and rebuilding a very tall retaining wall—twice—learning some hard life lessons along the way.
One of the things we love most about EARTHY is how deeply connected it is to its surroundings.
The soil used in the wall plasters, both interior and exterior, comes directly from the garden, grounding the home quite literally in its place.
We were also gifted long, fairly unattractive strips of grey marble, which we cut into squares, distressed, and laid in a checkered pattern in the large bathroom—something that unexpectedly turned out beautifully.
Many materials were salvaged from dump sites or the side of the road, including the two bathroom sinks made from old, sturdy smalt, which we refurbished. The brick floor downstairs was also a very conscious choice, to bring warmth, texture, and depth into the home in a way that feels different from the more expected slate or cement floors.
Yet my favorite detail of EARTHY is the “Sun-Moon” laid into the brick floor. A round marble piece that never quite found its place upstairs eventually revealed its purpose here.
It’s a quiet symbol—the two luminaries of our sky meeting at the foundation of the home.
Watching the garden grow alongside all of this has been pure joy.
In the end, it’s been incredible to see how the upstairs and downstairs mirror each other in subtle ways, while still holding completely different personalities—like two siblings shaped by the same roots, but living very different lives.
Thanks for reading!
Interested in these homes?
Click here for—> COZY or here for—> EARTHY
To book, please contact us
Building Bones to Skin
There is something quietly radical about renovating or building with your own hands.
It doesn’t announce itself as transformation at first. It shows up as dust under your fingernails, as sore shoulders at the end of the day, as the slow intimacy of learning how a wall is layered, how a floor is held, how a structure breathes. You think you’re changing a place, but very quickly you realize the place is changing you.
Building teaches patience in a way few modern activities do. You cannot rush plaster as it sets, or wood as it acclimates, or foundations as they settle into the earth.
Materials have their own timing, their own intelligence, their own opinions. When you ignore them, they crack, warp, fail. When you listen, they cooperate. (At least most of the time.)
Renovation also dismantles illusions of control. Plans shift—all the time. Hidden rot appears—or a completely buried wing of a house! A pipe runs where no pipe should exist—and full of the neighbor’s sewage! The fantasy of perfection gives way to improvisation, humility, and creative problem-solving.
You learn to hold disappointment without collapse, to pivot without panic. This kind of flexibility can truly only be earned.
As you strip a building down to its bones, you often find yourself doing the same. Old layers come off—paint, plaster, habits, identities. You discover what was done lovingly and what was done hastily, what still serves and what is quietly harming the whole. Repair becomes not just structural, but emotional.
You start asking better questions: What am I reinforcing? What am I covering up? What needs to be rebuilt rather than patched?
Building success is always measurable and honest. Always. Either a wall stands, or it doesn’t. Either a door fits its frame, or it doesn’t. Either the roof stays dry, or it leaks. It’s not personal, it’s just cold hard physical reality.
In a world of abstractions and endless digital loops, this kind of feedback is deeply stabilizing (albeit deeply frustrating sometimes, too).
And then there is the intimacy. To build or renovate a space you’ll inhabit is to weave yourself into it. Every decision leaves a trace of who you were at that moment—your hopes, your compromises, your care. Years later, you’ll lean against a wall you once patched, rest a hand on a beam you once lifted, and feel the quiet satisfaction of belonging somewhere you helped bring into being.
In the end, building doesn’t just create shelter. It creates authorship. It returns a sense of agency that modern life often erodes. You walk away changed—not because everything turned out perfectly, but because you learned how to stay present through uncertainty, how to collaborate with matter, and how to make something real, enduring, and imperfectly beautiful.
You don’t finish a renovation the same person who began it. You finish more at home—inside yourself just as much as inside the walls your hands helped raise.
