Greek architecture practice K-studio has completed a visitor space for drinks company Metaxa, carving an experiential route out of the stepped stone terraces of a century-year-old vineyard.

Located on the island of Samos the project, called Liknon, nestles into a large terraced vineyard that is home to one of Metaxa's key ingredients, the Muscat grape.

Instead of placing a building on the site, K-studio looked to tell the story of Metaxa's production through the landscape itself, inserting a sequence of display and tasting rooms connected by stone steps and pathways.

"We realised that Metaxa didn't need anything more than what they already had – they have the vineyard and that basically it, they just need to make sure that this vineyard is telling their story and invite people to experience it," founder Dimitris Karampatakis told Dezeen.

"So the brief became creating a walk through the vineyard and embedding in it ways to explore it further, rather than the more passive, one-way interaction that one might have with a museum," he added.

Liknon is organised loosely around a three-part journey, which begins at the top of the site and works its way down via narrow stone stairways.

The first space visitors come across focuses on "topos", place, entering an underground space with a soil floor where a four-metre-high glass wall creates a cross-section through the ground to reveal the root system of the vines.

The second space is dedicated to "chronos", time, where visitors have the opportunity to sample drinks and understand how the ageing of spirits affects their taste.

This experiential route ends in the Metaxa Bar, where large openings frame the landscape and an external terrace sheltered by a steel-wire canopy will gradually become overgrown with vines.

"We wanted to connect to the heritage, the aesthetics and materiality, the rhythm of the site," explained Karampatakis.

"Of course, all of these places can be accessed by different people at different times for different reasons, so it is a flexible narrative," he added.

Finishes throughout prioritise the natural drystone walls of the stepped terraces, with new additions in metal and wood being kept simple and raw.

"We didn't want to allow anything to be distracting you from the landscape itself, so geometry, scale, and materiality all try to poetically focus on the emotional experience of being on an ancient vineyard," said Karampatakis.

K-studio was co-founded by Konstantinos and Dimitris Karampatakis and is based in Athens.

Other projects completed by the studio include a stone holiday home in Mykonos overlooking the Aegean sea, and a hotel in Athens finished with local artwork and furnishings.

Liknon has recently been shortlisted in the cultural project category of Dezeen Awards 2023.

The photography is by Claus Brechenmacher and Reiner Baumann.