Daphné & Clément
A house found by chance, built by hand.
Daphné Keiffer and Clément Pouget — a physiotherapist with a quiet eye for interiors, a green-tech entrepreneur — found Avlaki on a holiday. Six months later, they were drawing the renovation plans on PowerPoint, two buildings away from being one home.
01
The encounter
They were not looking. A week of swimming in Vathi and walking the cliffs above Kastro turned, somewhere between a glass at La Loggia and a lunch at Manolis, into a slow conversation about how to come back. The house — two small stone buildings on a clifftop, half-empty, asking to be one — was the answer they had not known they were waiting for.
02
Six months of plans on PowerPoint
Neither was an architect. The plans were drawn slide by slide on PowerPoint, in conversation with a local Sifnian builder who knew which walls could come down and which had to stay. Two buildings became one. The terrace was opened to the sea. The pool was cut into the rock. The work took six months and the patience of every craftsman on the island.
03
An inventory of travels
Daphné carried the design. The Cycladic whitewash is the backdrop; the rooms hold pieces gathered over years — Mexican crosses above the beds, hand-woven Mexican rugs underfoot, Ivorian chairs from a craftsman in Abidjan, Moroccan urns from a souk in Marrakech, ceramics from Studio Ebur (their Lebanese-Ivorian friends). The Mediterranean as home port; the world as carry-on.
04
A house between generations
When the work finished, in late summer, Daphné and her sister were both pregnant. The first family week at Avlaki was a gathering across three generations — the parents of Daphné and Clément, the cousins-to-be, the friends who had watched the project from afar. The house was, from its first day, a place to come back to. That is still what it is.
“We found Avlaki on a holiday. We drew the plans on PowerPoint. And one September, two generations of our family met there for the first time.” — Daphné & Clément