Sifnos has been the pottery capital of the Aegean for centuries, and close to twenty studios still turn out the jars and pots exported from it. Two and a half hours from Athens on the fast ferry, it is an island known for quiet rather than nightlife.
Stamna Sifnos opened on a hillside above Apollonia in May 2025, the first hotel by the twin brothers Nikos and Costas Antimissaris, neither of whom came to it from hospitality. Its name is the Greek for a ceramic pot, a debt to the trade the island is known for.
The house was built to a single rule: every natural material in it, and every pair of hands that worked on it, came from within a radius of eighty nautical miles.
The setting
The property covers 13,000 square metres of hillside ten minutes on foot from Apollonia, removed enough for the capital to fall away. The architecture follows the slope rather than cutting into it, and the vegetation already there stayed where it stood.
The 15 rooms and 5 suites, all facing east, take the sunrise over the horizon, each with its own terrace or patio. Divided into separate volumes among gardens and dry-stone walls, the buildings read as a Cycladic settlement rather than a single block.
A pool sits within a Mediterranean garden, and a shaded area beside it carries gym equipment and a floor for daily yoga, Pilates and meditation.
The design
Tsimpos and Associates drew both the buildings and the rooms, with Theodosios Tsimpos and Konstantinos Kouros on the architecture and Kouros joined by Empi Spathi inside, working to a stated motto of from local to global.
The floors are marble from Tinos, Naxos and Paros, and the mortars carry Santorini earth. Furniture was made to order by regional craftspeople in cast iron, ribbed glass and olive wood.
Three colours run through the interiors: brick red for the ceramic artisans, leaf green for the garden, dusty blue for nostalgia. It is the defining scheme, set against whitewash and stone, so the buildings read as Cycladic before they read as designed.
The radius
The rule governed the construction rather than describing it afterwards: stone, wood and lime came from inside the circle, the labour with them, and the insulation was certified recycled material sourced from within it too.
Seaweed does the same work on the roofs, laid in layers for the protection it gives as much as the insulation. Fig timber once framed the beams, joints and floors built on the island, and the fig trees on the plot feed the kitchen instead.
Rainwater off the unplanted terraces runs into underground tanks and returns to the gardens as irrigation, with treated water from a private purification plant. What falls on paths and open ground drains in place.
The clay
Early in the project the brothers found the oldest pottery workshop on Sifnos and commissioned its owner, Giannis Atsonios, to make every ceramic piece in the hotel, in the rooms and the common areas alike.
The house takes its name from the stamna, the restaurant its own from pilós, the Greek for clay, and the pots put that debt in the hand rather than on a wall.
The relationship outlasted the work. The brothers send guests to the workshop for pottery classes, and Atsonios often comes to dine at the hotel with his family, among the work he made for these rooms.
The table
Pilōs serves dinner family style and outdoors, in a setting of olive wood shaded by reed pergolas, with the Aegean uninterrupted in front of it. Gikas Xenakis is chef consultant, and has been head chef at Aleria since 2012.
The cooking is Greek produce and local recipes turned by a contemporary hand: dolmadaki tartar, orzo with shrimp, marinated courgette, an aubergine pasticcio, with a list of Greek vineyards beside them.
The same space becomes the breakfast setting in the morning, with kalitsounia pies, Sifnos Loli and kagianas. Vegetables, herbs and fruit come from the Bostani garden and from the olive, fig and almond trees the land already carried.
The brothers
Nikos Antimissaris led international financial services companies across Europe, Asia and the Americas, while Costas Antimissaris built a career in fashion retail with Zara and went on to oversee several brands in Greece and Spain.
They found Sifnos in 2011, on one of the summers the two families spent working through the islands, and more than a decade separated that holiday from the opening.
‘We tried to integrate with humility, not as outside investors but as future neighbors hoping to create something the island could be proud of,’ says Nikos Antimissaris.
The eighty-nautical-mile radius is that sentence in marble, mortar and seaweed.
Who is this for
Stamna suits a traveller who wants the island more than the hotel: twenty rooms ten minutes on foot from Apollonia, with Kastro, Artemonas and the monastery at Chrissopigi within a quarter of an hour by car.
It will not suit anyone after a large resort or a night out. Sifnos trades in quiet, in more than a hundred kilometres of hiking trails and a coastline of small beaches.
What it offers instead is a building made of the island it stands on, down to the seaweed on the roofs and the pots in the rooms. The brothers meet their guests at the port themselves.
