NEMA Design Hotel & Spa stands at Analipsi, on the northern coast of Crete at the edge of Hersonissos and twenty minutes from Heraklion airport. Its identity was built on crisp lines, deep tones and an informal relationship with the beach in front of it.
On 1 August 2026 the house opened EÉSO by NEMA and turned that identity inward. The enclave holds four categories of villa-style suite, gardens, a shared pool and a restaurant that serves nobody else, all raised inside the existing grounds.
Its name comes from the ancient Greek word for within, and Omniview, the Athens practice that drew it, read that as an instruction about the plan rather than the mood. Privacy was settled in the geometry before anything was built.
The setting
The host house is adults-only and carries 83 rooms and suites, many of them with pools of their own. EÉSO sits above the two existing series, NEMA Retreat and NEMA Suites, as a third and higher tier, with a central landscape reserved to the guests who stay in it.
That reservation is what makes the enclave legible on the ground. Suites and gardens give way to a pool used by EÉSO guests alone, and NÁ LE MA, the à la carte restaurant at the edge of the plan, is closed to the rest of the hotel.
The result is a precinct inside a larger property: rooms, water, garden and table within a single boundary.
The design
Omniview designs and develops from a single Athens office, founded by the architect brothers Dimitri and John Tsigos with the property entrepreneur Miltos Kambourides. Dimitri Tsigos calls the scheme introverted, and means the plan by it rather than the atmosphere.
The practice kept NEMA’s vocabulary and altered its scale. Tones the hotel had used as finish are carried here by the fabric, in thick walls, deep openings and double-height rooms held in shadow.
Surfaces are grey, brown and close to black where a Cretan beach hotel would be white. Rough stone-like finishes meet glass and metal, and the strength of the light sharpens every join between them. Ledges are built in rather than added, and the walls are thick enough for the rooms to read as excavated.
Materials and trades came from Crete wherever the island could supply them, beginning in Heraklion, with mainland makers used only where it could not. The regional connection is in what the building is made of and who made it, not in any motif.
Inside the suites
There are four categories: The Atrium, The Pavilion, The Sanctum and The Penthouse. They differ in shape as much as in size. The Atrium is the smallest, 100 square metres for two adults, 60 indoors and 40 out, with an outdoor mini pool and a plan that turns towards its own courtyard.
The Penthouse is the highest and most open, 118 square metres with 60 indoors and 58 on a rooftop terrace; its pool is heated at the shoulders of the season alone, from 1 to 15 May and from 1 to 25 October. The largest plan, The Sanctum, reaches 134.
Some suites spread sideways behind long glazed elevations that tie bedrooms and living rooms to their gardens. Others rise, stone-like wall continuing past the sleeping area to high openings that admit daylight in thin bands.
The beds carry Coco-Mat sleep systems and the linen and towels are Guy Laroche, two houses NEMA names as collaborators.
The shared water
At the middle of the enclave the gardens open onto the pool, and Omniview has done something unusual at its edge. Instead of loungers ranged around the water, seating structures stand in it, each under a pergola of its own.
‘We wanted to go beyond the typical concept of in-water loungers and instead create inhabitable units within the pool,’ says Tsigos. Parts of the surface become places to sit rather than to swim across.
What separates one structure from the next is water rather than anything solid, and the roofs put shade over a pool otherwise open to the sky.
The table
NÁ LE MA completes the plan. It is à la carte, reserved to EÉSO guests, and open from 11:00 to 18:00, which makes it a room for the middle of the day rather than the evening.
Its setting is stone, wood and water. Slatted ceilings drop patterns of filtered light onto sculpted seating, and water runs alongside the dining area, so the edge between the room and the landscape is never quite drawn.
The wider hotel keeps the fuller table: Euphoria, the Cretan gastrobar Rizes and its seaside Deck, and the Divine Bar. NÁ LE MA is the one room that does not work in reverse.
Who is this for
EÉSO suits a couple who want a house rather than a room, and who count architecture among the reasons for coming. The plans are drawn for two adults, the host hotel is adults-only, and the enclave is built to be lived in rather than passed through.
It will not suit a traveller who wants a pale room open to the shore, the register the hotel keeps in its other two series. The wider property still runs safari routes across the island’s interior, wine tastings at Rizes, horse riding and golf a short drive away, and EÉSO guests can take any of it.
What the enclave itself offers is narrow and exact: between 100 and 134 square metres to a couple, an outdoor area running from 40 square metres to 78, and a pool that nobody outside the walls will walk past.
