Aer House / Studio Kyriakos Miltiadou

Architects: Studio Kyriakos Miltiadou
Area: 210 m²
Year: 2025
Photography: Creative Photo Room
Lead Architects: Kyriakos Miltiadou, Maria Tsoupani
Design Team: Studio Kyriakos Miltiadou
Lighting Design: conem consulting, archtube
Manufacturers: Rabel Aluminium Systems, El Greco Gallery, Il Bagno, Kyriakides Lighting, Mobhaus
City/Location: Nicosia
Country: Cyprus

Aer House is a residential project on the outskirts of Nicosia that proposes an inward-focused domestic model shaped through mass, subtraction, and spatial layering. Conceived as a monolithic concrete volume, the house originates from a simple geometric box that is progressively carved to form courtyards, passages, and planted voids. These interventions draw light, air, and vegetation into the interior, creating a nuanced balance between enclosure and openness. Distributed across four levels, the program separates public and private functions while maintaining continuity through intermediate spaces. The project unifies structure and architecture into a single material expression, engaging its Mediterranean context through selective framing rather than expansive views.

Situated near a sparse forest overlooking the suburban edges of Nicosia, the house deliberately resists the prevailing outward-facing residential typology. Rather than capitalizing on uninterrupted vistas, the design turns inward, privileging depth, privacy, and controlled interaction with the surrounding landscape.

This refusal of visual exposure establishes an intentional ambiguity. Aer House reads simultaneously as dwelling and object, positioned between architecture and sculpture, and questions conventional assumptions about how a house should relate to its environment and be perceived from the outside.

The project begins from a rigorous geometric premise. A three-dimensional grid defines a primary box with a fourteen-by-seventeen-meter footprint, which serves as the conceptual and spatial foundation for the design’s subsequent transformations.

Through a systematic process of erosion, portions of this initial volume are removed, allowing fragments of landscape to penetrate the structure. What emerges is a prismatic composition of solids and voids, where spatial complexity is generated through subtraction rather than addition.

Four six-meter-high perimeter walls encase the fragmented volumes, restoring a sense of unity. Incised with vertical cuts, these walls act as mediators, filtering light and views while maintaining a protective boundary between interior life, forest, city, and sky.

Access is articulated through a narrow vertical slit on the eastern façade, intensifying the moment of entry. This compressed threshold opens into a sheltered garden that immediately asserts itself as the organizational and experiential center of the house.

The central garden extends into a network of courtyards, passages, and exterior rooms distributed vertically and horizontally. Planted with local vegetation and illuminated from above, these spaces create an internal landscape that softens the building’s mass and sustains a continuous dialogue between inside and outside.

Internally, the house unfolds across four levels, with public functions on the ground floor and private rooms arranged above on staggered planes. Intermediate spaces blur functional boundaries, fostering fluid movement and visual continuity rather than rigid separation.

A concealed exterior stair leads to a planted rooftop terrace where the architecture recedes into the Mediterranean sky. Constructed entirely from exposed concrete, the house asserts a monolithic presence that is gradually tempered by vegetation, reinforcing the project’s vision of architecture, landscape, and inhabitation as inseparable conditions.