Kinsterna is a fortified mansion at Agios Stefanos, Monemvasia, Laconia, set in 25 acres of olive, vine and citrus on a hillside that looks across to the castle rock of Monemvasia. Its roots run through the Byzantine, Ottoman and Venetian eras, and parts of the fabric are older than the house you walk into. Today it runs as a boutique hotel across the whole estate.
Until the revolution of 1821 the mansion belonged to Ibrahim Beis, and after it the complex came into the ownership of the Greek state. The Kapitsini family bought the estate in 1870, and Lina Kapitsini, the last of them to live there, kept part of the buildings until the 1970s. After 1980 the complex was abandoned and reclaimed by nature, and that is the state its present owners bought. Architects, engineers and designers then took on the restoration: begun 2006, opened as a hotel in 2010, carried out under the supervision of the Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities, by traditional methods and with many local craftsmen in the work. Divercity Architects drew it, to a brief they set themselves of recreating a self-sufficient community on a long-abandoned landmark.
Water holds the plan together. The inner courtyard is built around the large cistern that gives the mansion its name, 20 built columns flanking it, and the architects made water the central element of the design, threading the historic and the new buildings into each other. The same water irrigates the orchards, vineyards and kitchen gardens.
Inside the buildings
Ottoman battlements and large chimneyed fireplaces sit in the same walls as Byzantine and Venetian work. The restoration kept the estate’s working fabric with them: an old oil mill, and a storage space hidden under the floor of a suite. Most rooms have fireplaces several hundred years old, which with the deep stone walls hold the heat through the winter, and war memorials left from the estate’s defensive architecture were built into the Byzantine suites. Handmade tiles from Geraki and old marble from Penteli went back in alongside them, and handmade lace went back on the walls of the rooms.
Beyond the rooms and suites the estate holds a series of residences and two villas, where the architecture is turned towards privacy and holds to the character of the historic estate. Each room looks onto something different: the vineyards, the olive groves, the sea, the gardens. The second-phase extension took its roofscape from the tiled, pitched roofs of Byzantine Monemvasia. From the water course the outlook opens to Mount Taygetus on one side and the fortified rock of Monemvasia on the other. In the spa there are jacuzzis under cover and in the open, a hammam, and heated mosaic benches in the rhassoul rooms.
The land
Over 250 native plant species grow on the estate, rare varieties among them. The vineyard works local grapes, among them Kydonitsa, Agiorgitiko, Assyrtiko, Monemvasia. The vines stand in the area now called Ampelakia, where the Venetians took their first steps towards the conquest of Monemvasia in 1689. The groves run to Athinolia, the dominant local variety, whose oil carries a high polyphenol content. The estate bottles its own extra virgin olive oil, cooks with it and sells it in the hotel shop. More than 60 per cent of produce is local, bought from farmers around the estate, cheese and smoked trout among it.
Power and the neighbours
The estate built its own photovoltaic park in 2024, working towards a zero-carbon footprint, and the power it does not use goes to vulnerable households nearby and to local churches. The house names self-sufficiency and energy autonomy through solar power as its philosophy. With the Municipality of Monemvasia it has also completed a study and the signage of the old trails in the surrounding area.
Who is this for
Kinsterna suits a couple or a family content to stay on one estate for a week, with Monemvasia a short drive off. Cobbled lanes lined with firs run down the hillside; jasmine and evening primrose scent the gardens, and cypresses lead to the pool and the tavern. There are two large pools, one for families and one kept for adults, a small farm, and a library with a piano and photographs of the mansion in its ruined state. Dogs are welcome.
