Winery in Mendenitsa, in a mountainous terrain close to Atalanti in central Greece overlooking a private vineyard of c.190.000 m2.
A winery with visitors-exhibition centre-museum and small guest-house and residence quarters, designed at the top of the buildable part of a sandy precipice dressing aesthetically and converting to legitimate volumetric treatment an already existing concrete shed with industrial installations already in place. The building volumes including shaded loading space for trucks arriving with the grapes, and underground space for cellar containing the oak barrels for aging, cabernet, merlot and syrah as well as proprietary blends of these red grape varieties and chardonnay white variety, as well as bottling, packing, storing and loading facilities of bottled wine for distribution, managers office and laboratory space for blending etc in addition to the existing main fermentation vat space. The whole complex was designed so as to enable building in stages based on the future progress of the enterprise, starting from the immediate of covered loading and production, and eventually expanding to the visitor’s centre, exhibition space, expanded cellars and storage, and finally the small guest house, symbolic tower (of the name of the winery), observatory and probable owners residence. The whole complexes location was fully restrained by the existing road, the existing buildings and the precipice and involved the whole scheme to be built in clearly defined stages, with the possibility that the final stages were not implemented. This required a very precise topographical survey that was conducted and a very detailed effort in order to precisely place the volume on the ground. The project was cancelled abruptly and pre-maturely by the owner who lived abroad, after the schematic design had been completed, without adequate opportunity for mutual clarifications.