Gallery

Description

This 20-room hotel is carved into the cliff-face, 300m above Santorini’s volcanic caldera. The understated design allows this extraordinary landscape to take centre stage. The hotel provides a contemporary interpretation of vernacular architecture: economy of space, radical simplicity, and organic forms. Like Santorini’s yposkafa – cave-like dwellings with rounded walls and domed roofs excavated from the rock-face – no furniture is free-standing. Custom-built storage and vanity units were moulded into alcoves. All-white interiors with brushed concrete floors reiterate the trademark whitewashed houses of the Cyclades islands. The infinity pool’s jagged outline echoes the zigzag paths that criss-cross Santorini’s sheer terrain.

Santorini’s hotel rooms are invariably front-loaded to face the view, leaving residents exposed to passers-by. To ensure privacy, fragments of volcanic rock were positioned in the windows of four rooms, interspersed with apertures that provide glimpses to the sea. The feature echoes a local architectural technique, more commonly used for retaining walls, in which minimal amounts of mortar are used, leaving gaps between the stonework. By exposing the stones and exaggerating the spaces between them, this light-filtering screen allows privacy and ventilation and casts speckled shadows as the sun goes down.

Biography

Divercity is an award-winning architecture practice with offices in London and Athens. The Athens based office was founded in 2004 by Nikolas Travasaros and Demetra Karabelia. In 2008 Nikolas Travasaros and Christina Achtypi founded the London office. The partners now include Dimitris Travasaros and Christos Dimitroukas. Divercity is an architecture and design practice with a large portfolio of projects, ranging from private residences to hotels, housing complexes, and commercial spaces. The studio’s works demonstrate an ability to handle challenging briefs in a variety of locations and contexts. International clients include Amber Resorts & Blue Marble Hotels, Grace Hotels Group, Intercontinental Hotels Group and One Athens.
Divercity was selected as a candidate for the Mies van der Rohe Award for Contemporary Architecture and was included in the 2009 Wallpaper* Architects Directory as one of the world’s leading young architecture practices. Other recognition include the presence in the 2008 World Architecture Festival, the 2007 European Hotel Design Awards and the 2009 World Travel Awards. Divercity works have been published in several architectural books and magazines and were included in international exhibitions.

Mplusm was founded in 2001 by the architects Memos Filippidis and Marita Nikoloutsou. The studio’s distinctive style derives from international influences, gathered in the individual investigation sequence, prior to each project. The Mplusm studio architectural projects featured in several magazines, such as Wallpaper, Interni, Surface, A10, Archis, Blueprint and Stauba, as well as in the book Greek Architecture Now by Karin Skousboll.
Memos Filippidis has written articles on architecture and design and has co-organized the architectural lectures at the Athens Megaron. In 2002 he was curator of the exhibition Big Brother: Architecture and Surveillance at the Athens National Museum of Contemporary Art, and was guest curator for the exhibition Porous Borders at the 2006 edition of the Venice Architectural Biennale.