Company History

     My company, SOLID STONE HOUSE, dates from April 2007, so its establishment is comparatively recent. My interest in the building of stone houses, however, is a family affair and dates back to a far earlier time.

     My father, Aristotelis Papadopoulo, started photographing old stone houses in Attica and the islands of the Cyclades from around 1963, and over the years he build up a collection of photographs and sketches. In 1974 he bought a piece of farmland, a few acres on a rocky hillside near Keratea in Attica, intending to cultivate it, but the initial deep ploughing threw up so much loose stone that planting was at a first impossible. He set himself to clear the field for planting with his hands, gathering up the stones, large and small, in scattered heaps: when he realised how much of it there was, he conceived the idea of using it to build a house. Two of the last stonemasons in Keratea (both of them elderly men - this being before the influx of building workers from Albania) built the house here pictured, in 1976 out of the field's own rough golden-brown stone.

     In the photograph (click to enlarge) my father is filling up the verandah with barrow loads of stone, prior to paving it. All the stone for the massive walls of the house was gathered by his own hands from this one rocky field, while the cornerstones and lintels of cream-coloured limestone were gleaned from the demolition-sites of old houses in Athens.

     The field also produced sufficient stone for the rough dry stone walls enclosing it.

Fulfilling a dream

     Born and bred in Athens, a businessman who had studied economics, my father may well have been unique leaving in his fifties a well-established family firm in order to fulfil a dream - and one involving back-breaking physical labour. This one solid stone house was the only one he was to build, but its construction pervade my childhood, and I inherited his love for traditional building in solid stone: a love which was to grow during later travels through Crete and Euboeia, the Peloponnese and the islands of the Aegean Dodecannese.

     I now live permanently in Crete, building houses which have first to satisfy my own ideal. SOLID STONE HOUSE is, for me, a way to do what gives me personal pleasure and satisfaction.

...SOLID STONE HOUSE...

 

'...is, for me, a way to do what gives me personal pleasure and satisfaction'.

(Stavros Papadopoulos).