Stamna opened above Apollonia in May 2025, on a hillside the Antimissaris brothers had been thinking about since 2011. Twenty keys on a plot of 13,000 square metres, ten minutes’ walk from the centre of the Sifnos capital, and one rule held to from the first drawing to the last handle: every material, and every hand that laid it, came from within 80 nautical miles.
The setting
Apollonia spreads amphitheatrically across three hills, and Stamna sits apart from it — near enough that the village centre is a walk of ten minutes, far enough that nothing of the village reaches the terraces. The ground is a hillside of 13,000 square metres, stepped rather than levelled, and the sea is in view from every quarter of it. The pool is set high on the slope, above the valleys and the ridges that run inland, which is the sort of arrangement that decides how a day is spent without anyone having to say so.
The provenance
Nikos and Costas Antimissaris are twins, and neither came to hospitality by the usual road. Nikos spent years leading international financial services companies across Europe, Asia and the Americas; Costas built a career in fashion retail at Zara, later overseeing several brands in Greece and Spain. They found Sifnos almost by accident, on one of the summer trips they took each year with their families, in 2011. More than a decade of planning followed before the doors opened in 2025. They arrived, in Nikos Antimissaris’s telling, not as outside investors but as future neighbours — keeping a low profile, learning the rhythms of the community, waiting to be judged by what was built. The house sits within the Design Hotels collection.
The design
Tsimpos and Associates drew it, under a principle the practice states as from local to global. Theodosios Tsimpos and Konstantinos Kouros carried the architecture; Kouros worked with Empi Spathi on the interiors. The governing move was to break the building into as many separate volumes as the slope would take, so that what stands there reads as a Cycladic house grown over time rather than a hotel raised at once.
The 80-nautical-mile rule did the rest. Floors are marble from Tinos, Naxos and Paros. Mortars are mixed with earth from Santorini. Furniture is cut from olive wood, set against cast iron and ribbed glass, with silk, linen and cotton from the nearer islands. The palette runs to three colours — brick red, leaf green, dusty blue — and the red is the point: a stamna is the traditional ceramic pot, and Sifnos has been the ceramic island of the Aegean for centuries. Every ceramic piece in the rooms and the common spaces is the work of one Sifnian potter, Giannis Atsonios, whose workshop is the oldest on the island and whom the brothers met early on.
The rooms
There are 20 keys — 15 rooms and 5 suites — across nine categories, which is a great many distinctions for a house of this size and tells you what the volumes were broken up for. A Cave Suite carries two gardens, one of them secret. One suite carries its own pool. A two-bedroom suite takes families without splitting them across corridors. In several categories the outdoor room is the larger one: the Honeymoon Nest holds 20 square metres inside and 60 out, the Maisonette 47 and 100. Inside, the furniture is custom-made by artisans of the region, and the bathrooms are given over to rainfall showers.
The table
The restaurant is Pilōs, which is the Greek for clay — the name and the house’s are a matched pair, both bowing to the same tradition. Gkikas Xenakis stands behind it as consultant chef, working a contemporary line through Greek cooking. Much of what reaches the pass is grown a few steps away, in Stamna’s organic Kipos, which supplies the kitchen with its fruit, vegetables and herbs; the rest comes from producers on the island. The list is Greek, the cocktails are infused with herbs picked by hand, and the room opens to the Aegean.
The service
The brothers are on Sifnos until October, and they meet arriving guests at the port themselves — a habit that is easy to describe as charming and is in fact a decision about scale. A house of 20 keys can be run by the people who built it. Winter takes them to Spain, and the island closes behind them.
The stewardship
The 80-nautical-mile radius covered labour as well as material, which is the harder half of the promise. Beyond it: certified recycled insulation, solar heating, LED throughout, rainwater collected into underground tanks, and a biological treatment plant on site. Pergolas and planted terraces shade the volumes and draw the air through them, so that the plant runs less on the days it would otherwise run hardest.
What Stamna proposes is not a new idea so much as a discipline rarely kept: that a house on a small island should be made of that island, by the people who live on it, and should be no larger than its makers can hold in their hands. Sifnos has been asked for less and given more before. It is unusual to see the arithmetic run the other way.
The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
