Amorgina stands at Agios Pavlos, Amorgos, on seaside ground inside the sheltered bay of Nikouria, with the uninhabited islet that names the bay opposite. It took its first guests on 6 July 2026. What makes it worth the crossing is the stonework: the dry-stone walls already on the land were extended and carried through the buildings, where they set out the floor plans.
The house was designed by Thodoris Zoumboulakis, Zoumboulakis Architects. The practice had built two houses nearby about 20 years earlier on the same principle, raising dry-stone walls through the plan to shape and organise the rooms, and Amorgina takes that from a house to a complex. Dry-stone construction is used widely enough to settle the buildings into the terrain and to cut the apparent scale of the volumes. Where that stone meets white surfaces the composition gains plasticity and variety, and the stone reads as a continuation of the walls running across the ground outside. The timber window and door frames are painted in varying colours drawn from the older settlements of Amorgos. The monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa, set against the rock, is the other source the architects name, and it reads in the central building, in the scale of the openings and the inclined walls.
Ten stremmata on the bay of Nikouria is the whole of the site, and the scale of the house is small by design. The suites number 16, in five categories, at 32 to 47 sqm internal, each with outdoor living and a private veranda facing the Aegean. The breakdown is ten apartments and six junior suites, and each one is laid out as two rooms with a private work area. The Junior Suite, the smallest, holds 32 sqm of internal living and takes three guests. The other four categories reach 47 sqm and take four: Family Suite, Courtyard Family Suite, Family Plunge Suite and Courtyard Family Plunge Suite. Every unit has its own outdoor space with an open view to the Aegean and the sunset, and the rooms are planned around that light.
The pool between the buildings and the sea
A 25-metre infinity pool, with a path to the beach below it, sits as a deliberate middle level between the architecture and the water, and carries the view on to the horizon. It faces the Aegean, Nikouria and the sunsets, and it is what the house puts at its centre. The bay is sheltered from the meltemi, the seasonal wind that crosses much of the Aegean in summer.
The table above the pool
The restaurant is above the pool, across indoor and outdoor rooms, and serves through the day. A live cooking bar and a lounge carry the less formal hours, for drinks and light meals. The cooking is Mediterranean, worked from seasonal ingredients and local tradition. Direction of the kitchen is Babis Kountouris, with Christos Sismanis in the kitchen day to day, and it is built on the produce and the food traditions of Amorgos and the Cyclades. Kountouris came to the island from Athens, where he was executive chef of the Art Lounge rooftop at NEW Hotel, in the Donkey Hotels group.
Getting to the bay
Agios Pavlos, Amorgos is 25 minutes from the port at Katapola, 15 minutes from Chora and 5 minutes from Aigiali. The island’s name travelled much further than its harbours through the poem the poet Nikos Gatsos titled after it, and the architects open their own account of Amorgina there.
Who is this for
Amorgina suits a reader who would rather wake on a walled hillside than in a town, and who likes a day that runs from the water to a late table. The ground is bare and stony, the buildings low, and the quiet is what the bay gives. Sunset is the direction everything faces, from the verandas to the pool deck. There is room for a family here, and for anyone who wants a working morning before the walk down to the sand.
