The instinct with a generous plot is to build a generous footprint. Resist it.
Two walls of light beat one
A room with windows on a single side is lit from one direction and never quite escapes it. A room with windows on two opposite sides is lit twice, and the quality changes through the day rather than simply dimming. It is the single largest difference between a house that feels alive and one that feels like an interior photograph.
Building one room deep forces this on you. Every principal room ends up with two aspects because there is nowhere else for them to go.
Air moves for free
Before mechanical cooling, every house on this coast was planned as a thin bar with openings front and back. Open both and the house ventilates itself. The old farmhouses on the olive terraces still do it better than most new construction, at no running cost.
The cost is circulation
The trade is real. A thin plan needs a long corridor, and corridors are expensive floor area that nobody lives in. The usual answer is to glaze the corridor and make it do something else: a gallery, a winter room, a place to put the books.
At Villa Aurelia that spine holds the entire art collection, and it is the room guests linger in longest.
