Why do people get hooked on their Hydra homes? What is it about dimpled white-washed walls and crooked doors that turns normal people into devoted house lovers? The answer is quite simple...
These dwellings are human.  Built with the bare hands of generations of fishermen and carpenters, the houses are organic creations that hold no resemblance to modern homes in European cities. These houses are built on a human scale, nothing too grand, nothing too confining. Originally built without architects, they have bumps and curves and useless bits; in short, they are full of imperfections, as we humans are. 
In the alleyway leading to the old Garden restaurant, you will find pristine white-washed staircases that lead nowhere, ending in a blank wall. They could have been knocked down, they clog the pathway, but the islanders left them there all the same, respecting their presence. 
My house has a kitchen wall so pregnant and bowed, that it is impossible to hang a picture on it. When it rains, the swell enlarges, the house expanding naturally with the elements. The wall is packed with earth, red crumbling flinty earth that provides superior insulation. Sometimes a little trickle of read earth seeps through cracks in the china cupboard where the shelves don’t meet. I don’t mind, I just sponge away the earth and replace my cups. I can imagine that the same thing happening in an apartment in Berlin or London would be cause for a law suit. They have model eco-homes in fashionable cities that claim to know about natural insulation. The public visits them on weekends to marvel at the technique. Any stone-built Hydra home could teach them lessons. The thick walls keep you cool in summer and warm in winter, the old technique of laying dried seaweed under a thatch of sticks called skisas inbetween the ceiling beams is another form of clever insulation. Old Hydra homes are eco-friendly in every way. 

My wall is coated in over two hundred years of white wash layers. At one time the Greeks who lived in this house had tired of snowy white and added pistachio green to the whitewash, another layer reveals the walls were once ochre even further back in time. I see all these layers, all this history of human taste, whenever my wall cracks. To restore the wall’s white canvas all you need is a pail of whitewash and a brush. You can dab a bit on, over the crack whenever you walk by. I find it astonishing that today, outside Hydra, people can build a house they choose from a catalogue and the walls are painted and chemically treated in such a way that the owner never has to paint them again in a lifetime. In the new world, you sit staring at the same smooth walls devoid of inconsistencies. It’s a bit insulting to slide into extreme old age when your walls, your house, does not age around you.

That’s why foreigners who buy houses on Hydra become captivated by their new homes. They have to care and tend them like children. A Hydra house is never complete, is never perfect. It needs nurturing and a pair of doting hands to stain its ancient wooden beams with the juice from crushed walnut shells, to plant its courtyard with jasmine and  geranium and protect the gardenia from the searing heat. Walk into a Hydra village house that has been inhabited by an interior designer for decades, who has lavished untold hours on its care and you nearly gasp at its state of perfection, its warm rustic charm, its cleanliness and order, yet - you are guaranteed the owner will be able to show you his latest project, either turning the flagstones or digging new flowerbeds or relocating the kitchen. People invite other people over to see the new water feature in the courtyard or to test the new cushions for the Turkish divan.
To say Hydra house owners become obsessed with their homes is no exaggeration. It is not just the joy and challenge of discovering a ruin and restoring its beauty, you can do that in any country. 
Hydra houses are individual little fantasy worlds. You own a small cosy world within a tiny world, that is the island. Hydra is unlike any other place in Greece, any other place in the Mediterranean. Untouched by the industrial revolution, the island is a world unto itself. The fantasy you enter into is not just island life, it is island life as it was in centuries past. This is life before the automobile. This is the place where you have time to think, where journalists become writers, where ordinary artists become extraordinary ones. 

Much of this creative activity revolves around the courtyard of a Hydra house. The most typical of house designs on Hydra would mean you enter your home through a high walled courtyard that offers shade and a place to sit at dusk to take a glass of wine with friends. 
Within the courtyard you plant fragrant vines and fruit trees that release their scent for the evening. You have pots of basil and mint that you use for cooking and a pistachio or almond tree. It makes you feel quite rich to collect bags of almonds and freely distribute them to your friends. A Hydriot courtyard can be a source of great solace and comfort, a pleasure and a refuge.
If you are lucky, it will be paved with large slabs of Dokos stone, ox blood red in colour with faint veins of white, this marble from a nearby island will be smooth and polished from thousands of feet treading and dancing over it. Or there are the creamy square cut flagstones of mainland porous stone joined by thick white grouting and either bleached to the colour of bone or stained by lichens, depending on how vigorous the housewives are. Lastly, there are the cheap irregular cuts of Caristo slate, which is a dirty grey green colour and only looks nice when wet. Many now use Caristo and then varnish it, a cheap solution, but an ugly one.
Lately, new arrivals have gone in for paving their courtyards in terra cotta but that is not the traditional style. They seem to be confusing Tuscany with Arcadia.

The traditional style is what keeps Hydra charming. It is the island’s wealth. The hardest houses to sell are those recently erected. Built with bricks, or concrete frieze blocks, the walls are made flush, the courtyard dismissed in favour of an extra bathroom and there is no cistern for rainwater, no avli (garden) for the soul. 
These homes will never seduce the owner and it’s true that they appear mostly locked up, nobody lingers to write a novel or experience a romantic Hydra winter.
Luckily for the island, such new homes are few and there are still eighteenth and nineteenth century stone houses with courtyards to be found and purchased. 
Building a new home need not mean straight walls and cheap bricks, the masons of the island still know how to make traditional stone houses, how to chisel keystones, how to arch a recess and sculpt the hood of a fireplace. I could show you new homes that look as if they are a century old, but such construction requires patience and a large dose of natural good taste.  Such new/old Hydra houses dwell happily alongside their older neighbours. Sturdy and timeless, they will be houses that live and breath, expand with the heat and contract with the cold. They have rippled granite walls and wooden ceilings, shady courtyards and stone hearths. They become private worlds within the Hydra fantasy - which is one fantasy you can grasp hold of, enter and make real.

The editor
 © Electronic Publishing Corp.2003