In central Athens, a family house full of space

In 2014, the husband-and-wife architects Marianna Rentzou and Konstantinos Pantazis bought an old three-storey townhouse in Petralona, one of Athens’s rare quiet inner-city neighbourhoods. To make their mark, the couple demolished windows and moved walls, but they were keen to retain something of the building’s ramshackle spirit. From the street, guests walk into a covered internal courtyard complete with a 16ft bottle tree, where the couple’s two children play. “Our kids’ voices travel from one level to another,” Rentzou says, with a smile. Inside the building there are very few doors, one space flows seamlessly into the next. The ground floor opens directly on to the garden.

This sense of openness and flexibility is deliberate. Both Rentzou and Pantazis grew up in the countryside outside Athens and they dreamed of recreating that sense of freedom for their own family. “We talk a lot about circulation,” Pantazis says. “Not with regards to the floor plan, but how we move through the space, how we choose where to be and when.” The children find playful ways to use the house. Pantazis points at an old ladder propped up against a landing window – the kids use it as a more adventurous route to and from the garden. “We didn’t childproof the house so much as make it much more fun,” Rentzou says.

When I visit on a sunny spring morning, Rentzou wears a kimono, styled as a blazer with jeans, brought back from a recent family trip to Japan where the couple taught a short course at Kyoto’s architecture school. They met as students at the National Technical University of Athens, but didn’t immediately work together. “We looked at each other’s work from a distance,” Rentzou says. They spent nearly a decade working separately around the world. Pantazis moved to Tokyo, where he worked for the architect Jun Aoki. Rentzou studied for a Masters degree at UCL’s Bartlett School under Sir Peter Cook, and worked for Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam.

They returned home in 2008 and joined forces as Point Supreme, through which they have worked on projects across Europe – a fire station in Belgium, a new campus for Marseille’s architecture school – as well as work throughout Athens. They are tireless proponents of the city’s urban redesign, regularly proposing ideas for a better-functioning capital.

Despite having worked together for nearly two decades, the pair approach their work differently. “The practice has always been about contradictions, opposites, unexpected combinations,” Pantazis says. Rentzou, who led a team at Koolhaas’s practice OMA, is pragmatic – a fan of structure and process. Pantazis is “a bit of an idealist,” he says. “My mother was a painter.” System and freedom, method and instinct. “Our differences are mostly energising,” says Rentzou, though “right now we’re at a moment of reflection,” having been through a time of “productive tension”. That tension is on show in the house. Nothing is too smooth, too neat. The home isn’t minimalist, nor is it traditional or contemporary – often how the house looks depends on your vantage point. There is contrast on each floor and between them. It’s a “collage” the pair say. “That’s what freedom means to us,” Rentzou says. “Not having to be just one thing.”

The materials and colours around the house reinforce this philosophy. Glass tiles plucked from a demolished hen house are used next to brightly coloured tiles from a defunct factory. The beginning of the home’s main staircase is made of rough-hewn stone, but it suddenly transitions into a sleek pink material. As in any well-loved home, every room carries stories of people and places. Here there are various bits and pieces picked up from the pair’s travels.

Greece is experiencing a move towards a “glossy” homogeneity in architecture. “There’s been a loss of Greekness,” Rentzou says, not just in aesthetic but in the loss of scale, “especially when it comes to flashy island villas.” Point Supreme’s work is an antidote to that – diverse, a blend of traditional and contemporary – and nowhere is that more evident than in this home. When the pair were in Japan recently, a thought hit them. “We were struck by the way different things coexisted,” says Rentzou. “Old and new, expensive and makeshift, analogue and digital. Many combinations. Many contradictions.” Pantazis adds: “That’s exactly how we think about our lives.”