Divercity Architects Trac

Project: Hotel
Location: Santorini, Greece
Client: Grace Hotels Group
Project Status: Complete, 2010
Collaborators: Mplusm, architects
Sophia Vantaraki, space consultant
Contractor: FMI
Photos: Erieta Attali & Serge Detalle

World Architecture Festival Awards,
Holiday and Hotels (small), shortlisted 2011
The Restaurant & Bar Design Awards,
International Restaurant, shortlisted 2011 (UK)
Tatler’s Travel Guide, listed in the
101 Best Hotels of the World 2011 (UK)
The European Hotel Design Awards, Bedroom
and Bathrooms and Newbuild, shortlisted 2010 (UK)
The World Travel Awards, Greece’s Leading
Boutique Hotel, winner 2009
Conde Nast Traveller, listed in Hot List
of the World’s Best New Hotels 2009

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
are moulded into alcoves. All-white interiors with brushed
concrete floors reiterate the trademark whitewashed
houses of the Cyclades. 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
are 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 dappled shadows as the sun goes down.