Cypriot architect George Papadopoulos, founder of Skinotechniki, has completed the design of his own home, House in Lemesos, Cyprus. The aim was to create a family home for me, my wife, and our four boys. For convenience and privacy, we wanted our place of work to be within the same plot but to have a separate entrance. The building had to fit into it’s surrounding environment of both traditional two storey stone and adobe single family dwellings, and some small old industrial buildings. At the same time it had to be modern, learning from traditional architecture but not copying it. Towards my aim of creating a coherent and safe environment for my family, I drew ideas from my own childhood memories of playing under huge plane trees in a house next to a mountain stream.
The main bedroom has it’s own special cooling system. A geothermic system where using a small fan, air is drawn from the bedroom through 30cm diameter pipe buried underground. The air comes back in the room providing a comfortable temperature. The children’s bedrooms face west and could have been very hot at night. This is not so because they are constructed of lightweight materials -steel and wood- that do not store and therefore emit heat back into the room. This idea is taken from traditional Lemesos houses which had a room, usually on the first floor, built of lightweight materials and used for sleeping in the hot summer nights. Heating is achieved using a diesel boiler. This is assisted with 8 racks by 20 solar heated vacuum tubes, that heat the living room under-floor heating system.
