The brief was deceptively simple: design a holiday pavilion that felt carved from the Sardinian coastline rather than built upon it. Studio Mareterra, known for their sensitive interventions in Mediterranean landscapes, envisioned a structure where the boundary between interior and exterior dissolved entirely. They needed a material that could hold the intense Sardinian light without glare, resist the salt-laden sea air, and maintain a cool tactile presence under bare feet.
Thassos White was the only stone that met every criterion. Quarried from the island of Thassos in northern Greece, this pure-white dolomitic marble is among the brightest natural stones in the world. Its crystalline structure reflects daylight with remarkable warmth — what the architects described as the ability to hold afternoon light the way still water does. We worked directly with the quarry families on Thassos Island to select blocks with minimal veining, ensuring the pavilion's surfaces would read as continuous luminous planes.
The most demanding aspect was the book-matching across the entire floor plan. Each of the 312 panels had to be sequenced so that adjacent slabs mirrored each other's natural grain patterns, creating a seamless flow across 840 square meters of living space. Our production team spent three weeks at the processing facility in Izmir, photographing, numbering, and crating each panel in order before shipping.
Installation on-site required a dedicated team of six Italian stone masons working in two shifts. The panels were laid using a thin-set system over a reinforced screed to accommodate the pavilion's underfloor heating. Despite the complexity, only three panels required recutting — a testament to the precision of the quarry's block selection and our fabrication oversight.
The result is a space where the stone reads almost as a liquid surface, reflecting the changing Mediterranean light from dawn through dusk. Guests at the pavilion consistently remark that the floors feel alive, as though the stone itself is responding to the time of day. For DIJA, this project reaffirmed that Thassos White, at its highest grade, is unmatched for light-filled coastal applications.
We chose Thassos because it holds afternoon light the way still water does.
— Studio Mareterra