The Aristide has nine suites in a Neoclassical and Art Deco mansion in the historical centre of Hermoupolis, on Syros, and the same house holds an art gallery, an artists’ residence and workshop, and two bars. A marble staircase and Doric columns carry the front of it. This was one of the last neoclassical houses built in Greece, late enough for Art Deco detail to settle inside a classical shell.
It stands in Vaporia, Hermoupolis, the quarter that was once home to the town’s shipowners and industrialists. Oana Aristide, with her sister Jasmin and their mother Simona, restored the house as though it were their own. The sisters had come to Syros as holidaymakers, looking for somewhere small to keep a growing collection of contemporary art, and what they found was the derelict former tax office of the Cyclades. Oana is a London-based economist who published a dystopian novel, “Under the Blue”, while she was launching the hotel; Jasmin is a doctor practising in Sweden, where the two of them grew up. The beach is 8 minutes’ walk, and so are the town centre and the main square.
The collection is still the organising idea. A gallery, a workshop and a residency for visual artists sit in the same house as the suites. The permanent collection hangs throughout the hotel and includes work by Christy Lee Rogers, Igor Skaletsky and Riccardo Vecchio, weighted towards portraiture and figurative work. The gallery shows temporary exhibitions by the artists in residence, and the residency gives one artist a room in the hotel and exclusive use of the workshop.
The marble and the materials
The white staircase settled the material for the rest of the house. Nine types of local marble run through the interiors, chosen for the range of colour, texture and translucence a single Greek material can hold, and each suite takes its character from the stone in it. The dark marble of the Tinos suite comes from the quarry that supplied the Louvre. The tobacco-tinted Kapandriti stone, in the suite of the same name, is the cladding on the Bank of Greece.
The restoration held to one rule, which is that the materials of the house be real. The doors take keys. What reads as wood or stone is wood or stone, and false ceilings and boxed-in walls were treated as problems. Smart controls, integrated heating and cooling, soundproofed plumbing and energy-efficient cladding were fitted to the fabric of the building. Almost all the suites have 5 metre ceilings, sea views, a balcony or terrace, and either a private plunge pool or a stone bath tub. Every suite takes one or two guests.
The bars and the kitchen
Guests choose between the garden bar, in the shade of trees, and the rooftop bar with its open sea views. From the roof the view takes in the Hermoupolis waterfront, the new superyacht marina and the oldest working shipyard in Greece.
The kitchen is Leo Restaurant & Cocktail Bar, where chef Thanos Stasinos builds a menu on Greek raw ingredients and the flavours of the Aegean, and chef Ioanna Andrianou runs it day to day. Breakfast, brunch and dinner lean on local, seasonal and organic produce and on Syros recipes, and most of the food comes from the island or its Cycladic neighbours.
How the house is run
The house uses no single-use plastics and heats its water with solar panels. Soaps and shampoos arrive in large refillable containers and are decanted into the hotel’s own ceramic dispensers, the toothbrushes are bamboo, pillows and duvets have synthetic down, and food leftovers are composted. The regreening and tree-planting project, run with local experts and in collaboration with the Cyclades Preservation Fund, is there to offset the carbon footprint of guests’ travel to the island.
The hotel does not accommodate children under 12, because of the architecture of the historic building and for reasons of safety. Closed November to April, it keeps a short season.
Who is this for
The Aristide suits travellers who come for art, architecture and a Cycladic capital with a working life of its own. Marble-clad avenues run down to the seafront, where a pontoon and a concrete platform give on to deep clear water, and pastel mansions climb the amphitheatre of hills above the port, with the Catholic church of St George and the Orthodox Church of the Resurrection on the two summits. The hosts arrange hiking, cookery courses, visits to local producers and boat expeditions.
