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Eftapaton condominium
Point 2/10
1958
Year of construction
Fotis Kolakides, Stavros Economou
Architect
In Limassol, many houses have official names and nicknames.“Eftapaton” means a seven-story house (“efta” or “epta” meaning “seven”).The folk name conveys a feeling of pride, as in the late 1950s in Limassol it was a skyscraper.
Just fancy! At that time, there were fields and a city dump all around. Land was worth a penny. Therefore it was here that the young architect Fotis Kolakides decided to experiment.
Subsequently, this man became known by the whole island — he was mayor of Limassol for 20 years.
However at that moment, Kolakides was just starting his way and operated here both as an architect and as a developer.
Kolakides proposed a new standard of living in Limassol. Before, Cypriots lived in separate houses, now the architect told them that it was out of fashion. Financially, the project failed, and the house was eventually sold to another company. But all the same, the new concept of urban living was already making its way to public conscience and to the market.
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The building has recently been painted, but actually it is in dire need of restoration, as it has been completely depersonalized in its 65 years of life.
The first floor of the house, once left vacant — following Le Corbusier’s principles, has been glazed and turned into a bank. Gone is the solarium on the top floor.
Balconies, firstly concrete, as the masters of German modernism liked to do in the interwar period, were replaced by boxes closed on all sides with aluminum imitation, inappropriate for this architecture.
The building was much less fortunate than the famous Amatus Hotel, which Kolakides built together with Walter Gropius in 1973.
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Before saying goodbye to this iconic house, we suggest going into the courtyard and looking at the metaphysical landscape — a concrete idyll of the 1960s, where city planners and developers left not a single tree.
A gorge amidst tall houses, compared to which Eftapaton seems a tiny tot! How fortunate that this idyll is a thing of the past and streets dressed in trees are back in vogue.
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