Built To Be Reclaimed

Jan and Vanessa left city life for a Cretan hillside in 2022. The architect Sigurd Larsen gave them six apartments built like the slope itself, and content, in time, to disappear into it.

Meraki is a Greek word that resists clean translation: to do a thing with care, with intention, with a piece of yourself left in the work. Jan and Vanessa, who left city life for Crete in 2022 with their children and opened Meraki Studios, six self-catering apartments, in 2025, have named them accurately. The site is a terraced hillside near Kissos, in the Rethymno highlands of central Crete, with olive trees among hand-built walls, the view running from mossy ravines to bare summits.

The buildings are the work of the Danish architect Sigurd Larsen, whose architectural design extends to the interiors and the furniture too. His governing idea was that a house on this slope should behave like the slope: a constructed rock, a concrete grid set into the irregular ground and infilled with local stone that holds the cool of the night into the afternoon heat. Green roofs and the patient hope that the region's lichen will, in time, creep over the whole thing, completing the disappearing act. Building into a Cretan hillside is, it should be said, no innovation; the island has cut its dwellings into rock since long before it had a word for architecture, and Larsen's grid is the rationalist's account of a very old instinct. The units sit cave-like in the rock, geometrically cut but materially native, each facing the valley on one side and the bare peaks on the other. Overhangs, shutters and pergolas do what air-conditioning would do elsewhere, only with more grace; the rooms stay deliberately bare. Simplicity, here, is the luxury.

Larsen is a believer in the building as a single work, down to the last fitting. The furniture was made on site from Cretan cedar by a local carpenter, the beds placed so the first thing you see at daybreak is the view. The exposed timber is African hardwood, the architect having reasoned that a plot closer to Cairo than to Copenhagen had earned the right to it. The kitchens are small but complete, and the whole cluster of six can be taken at once, which makes it quietly luxurious, minimalist accommodation for a group of up to sixteen.

There is no restaurant, by design. The plot, 6,500 square metres known locally as Tsikalaria, was once tended by a man with an unusual knowledge of plants; honouring him, the founders have begun an organic garden among the old olive terraces, which guests are welcome to raid, and set a long infinity pool into the existing stonework. You arrive to find local olive oil on the counter and the makings of a Greek salad in the fridge, with a handwritten card explaining how the village makes it. After that, you are on your own, happily: the tavernas of nearby Spili, the trails of Psiloritis and the beaches of the south coast are all a short drive, and, as Larsen likes to point out, Crete may well serve the best food in Greece. Most of the day, there is simply the valley to look at, and the pool when the heat climbs.

On a terraced hillside near Kissos, Crete, Meraki Studios are six cave-like apartments by Sigurd Larsen, built of concrete and local stone among olive terraces.

A Meraki Studios apartment with its green roof set into the hillside at golden hour, central Crete | The Aficionados

Meraki Studios' stacked concrete-and-timber apartments above a dry-stone wall on the terraced Cretan hillside | The Aficionados

Board-marked concrete beams and a bamboo pergola casting striped shadows at Meraki Studios, Crete | The Aficionados

Self-catering apartment interior at Meraki Studios with a platform bed, kitchenette and full-height glazing onto the Cretan hills | The Aficionados

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