Myconian Sunrise Takes the Daktylides Family One Cove West of Elia

Myconian Sunrise reopened on Agrari Beach for the 2025 season as the fourteenth hotel the Daktylides family runs on Mykonos. Six of the other thirteen stand on Elia, the next beach east over the headland. Galal Mahmoud, the Lebanese architect who has drawn for the Daktylides since 2015, has set its interiors in the 1970s, the decade they opened their first 25 rooms.

The setting

Agrari is a sheltered bay of sand on the south coast, 9 kilometres from Mykonos Town and 20 minutes by road from the airport. The hotel steps down to it, so the beach is directly below the rooms and everything else on the island is a drive. The hotel recommends a hired car or a motorbike, because taxis can be scarce in high season, and it runs a private shuttle to Deos, the collection’s hotel above the town. A water taxi calls at the beach for Platis Gialos, and Elia is the next cove along.

The provenance

George and Elefteria Daktylides opened Kohili, 25 rooms above the town and its windmills, in 1979, and their four sons, Panos, Markos, Vangelis and Marios, run the collection now. Between that first house and this one they put six hotels on Elia and four in the town, so Agrari is a cove the Daktylides have looked across at since 1979. The house dates the beach’s weddings and parties to the early 1970s, the same decade Kohili opened.

The purchase of the old Sunrise Beach Hotel was announced on 5 August 2024. In February 2025 the collection announced its admission to Relais & Châteaux, and on 17 March the association listed it among eleven new houses with the reopening slated for May, so the badge arrived before the doors did.

The design

Mahmoud’s practice, GM Architects, refurbished the Ambassador at Platis Gialos in 2015 and drew Deos in the town in 2024, so Sunrise is its third building for the collection. The practice describes the beach suites as a feast of colour and pattern in the manner of 1970s Mykonos, and outside it kept to whitewash and timber shutters.

Inside, at Almiriki, the beachfront taverna, it used chestnut timber sourced on the island, rattan, coloured cement tiles and a palette of greens and light browns. The walls are sculpted to the shape of the tamarisk leaf, after the trees the restaurant terrace was built among rather than through. In the photographs a patterned, backlit headboard and a pair of tiered rope pendants carry a bedroom, and the linen and the floor around them are plain, so the decade reads as a reference rather than a scheme.

The rooms

The smallest of seven categories is 20 m² on the ground floor, with a terrace facing the pool and the beach across the garden, and the largest is the Executive Beachfront Two-Bedroom Suite, 75 m² inside and 45 m² of deck with a Jacuzzi. Twenty square metres is small by any measure, and the category is sold on its terrace. What separates the rest is the slope. The upper rooms take the long view over the bay, and the beachfront suites give that up for the Jacuzzi deck and the shortest walk to the sand. Garden and sea are listed as different categories at the same 24 m², which is honest, because they are different holidays.

The table

Almiriki is the Greek word for the tamarisk, and the restaurant’s garden terrace sits among the existing trees. Maslaris runs it from noon until 10.30pm, and breakfast is served on the pool terrace from 7.30. The sourcing is shared with the collection’s other kitchens: herbs, seasonal vegetables and fruit grown for the group alone, fleur de sel harvested around Delos, the island 30 minutes from the town by boat, octopus from a lifelong friend of the family who knows the local water, and lamb and pork reared on family land by George Daktylides himself, who took up livestock after he retired as chief executive in 2011.

The beach club below runs under the same name, with loungers, a bar and the taverna’s menu on the sand, and its dining is set in large woven domes. The wind on this coast is the meltemi, which blows hardest in July and August, and the domes are the one part of the design that answers the weather rather than the decade.

Who it is for

Sunrise suits the traveller who wants Agrari to be the whole of the day: the bay a flight of steps below the room, a table under the tamarisks, the six sister hotels at Elia over the headland. It will disappoint the guest who wants Mykonos Town on foot, and the visitor in the smallest category who expected 20 square metres to feel like a suite. Anyone who has stayed on Elia will recognise the kitchens and the shutters. What is new is the cove, and the colour inside it.