Hotel Argini is 11 rooms and suites inside a merchant’s house in Vaporia, the quarter of Ermoupoli where the shipowners and industrialists of Syros put their money. The house went up in 1853, for Grigorios Paikos, his wife and their nine children. It opened as a hotel on 26 April 2024, after the Polykretis family spent seven years on it, and it stands at 11-13 Apollonos Street, Vaporia, Ermoupoli, Syros.
The reason to come is the discipline of that work. Seven years, under Hellenic Ministry of Culture regulation, went into a listed building that successive owners had let slide into disrepair. Craftsmen restored the stone masonry walls, 1.20 metres thick in places, and left the stone visible, so the construction and scale of the former residence stay legible from inside. They restored the tall internal double-leaf hardwood doors and laid oak floor boards as wide as the boards of the 19th century. Cement-free mortars protect the structure that was already standing. The interiors are the work of Costas Gagos Architecture & Design with Tree Company, and they stay quiet around everything the house already had.
The one room the house did not have before was already under the floor. The basement cisterns, vaulted and stone-built, became the spa: a hammam and indoor heated pool in the former cisterns, the pool with hydromassage, the room low-lit under the old curvature. Guests can take both privately, as the whole spa, so a couple has the vaults to themselves.
The house Paikos built
Refugees of the Greek War of Independence founded Ermoupoli, among them those who fled the Chios massacre of 1822, and the city grew into a commercial port and an industrial hub. Around 1,290 documented neoclassical buildings went up between the 1830s and the early 20th century. Vaporia, which means ships, is where the money was most visible.
Paikos arrived while the war was still on, a former member of the Filiki Eteria, the secret brotherhood formed to overthrow Ottoman rule and found an independent Greek state. By 1853 he was an established businessman and built accordingly: a parlour and a ballroom for the gatherings the quarter expected, and painted ceilings and walls through the principal rooms. He died in 1879. The mansion then passed through several prominent families, went on the market repeatedly and was left to deteriorate. Yiannis Polykretis, the father, grew up next to the decaying building. His family bought it and began the seven years.
The paintings
Decades of neglect had sagged the ceilings and let water in through cracks in the roof, and the ceiling paintings came out of it badly damaged and discoloured. What survives carries folkloric subjects, figures of the Greek Revolution and Renaissance motifs, the work of Italian and local artists; the hotel’s own account credits Venetian painters. Conservation saved the paintings, and the room lighting works around them: custom fittings light the wall paintings while protecting them from heat.
The rooms
The 11 rooms and suites run from 20 to 55 square metres, and every one is named. Several names are tied to the building and to the city, G. Paikos among them. Bathrooms are marble, with underfloor heating, walk-in rain showers and Bulgari amenities, and the marbles are named: white Dionysos, green Tinos and dark Grigio Carnico, a different stone marking one room from the next.
The table and the roof
The hotel’s restaurant is elexis, in the garden, with a menu built on the dishes of the Cyclades. On the roof, the Bar Under the Sky has a large plunge pool and looks out over the Aegean and the neighbouring islands.
Who is this for
Argini suits a traveller who wants a working city. Ermoupoli is the capital of Syros, and the house stands on Apollonos Street, one of the main streets of Vaporia and steps from the cathedral of Agios Nikolaos. Indoors the pace is set by an internal courtyard with exposed masonry façades, and by geometric marble floors through the common rooms, with a breakfast area and two lounges off them. Rooms face the sea, the courtyard or a quiet street. There is also a business lounge for anyone who has to work.
