Tella Thera opened above Kissamos Bay on 14 July 2025, on the north-west shore of Crete — 20 suites and a villa built half into the hillside, beneath roofs planted with the olive trees that stood on the ground before them. It is the work of a couple, Loukas Tourkomanis and Chevon Low, who commissioned the Athens practice Pieris.Architects to draw a house that would take as little out of the hill as it could. The investment ran to €10 million. From the bay below, it is difficult to see at all.
The setting
Kissamos lies at the far north-west corner of Crete, past Chania and before the road gives out at Balos. The house stands on a hillside of olive trees 8 minutes from the centre of the town and 1 hour by road from Chania International Airport. The site runs to 15,000 square metres and is arranged amphitheatrically down the slope, so that each suite holds the bay in view without holding its neighbour. This is not the Crete of the south-coast resort strip, nor the Crete of Elounda. It is the quieter end of the island, and the house has been built to keep it that way.
The provenance
Its founders describe the property as a labour of love begun by a couple and built by a few. Tourkomanis came to it from a career in technology, a former Airbnb executive who also worked at TikTok. It was he and Low who engaged the architects and the landscape architect, and the name they chose carries the brief. Tella is drawn from Tellus, the Roman goddess of the Earth and, in the Greek telling, the name of the happiest man alive; Thera comes from therós, summer, and therismós, harvest. A single house standing under its own name is a rarer thing in Greece than another arrival under a familiar flag.
The design
The architecture is the work of Stella Pieri and her team at Pieris.Architects, with the grounds drawn by the landscape architect Karolos Chanikian. Their approach was to follow the topography rather than flatten it, avoiding large-scale excavation, so that half of each suite sits within the earth and the other half beneath a planted rooftop of native herbs, Mediterranean species and olive trees. The earth does the cooling; the roofs absorb the heat that would otherwise fall on them. Inside, the language is cave-like and continuous — microcement surfaces carried without a break, Venetian-inspired arches taken from the island’s own building tradition and reinterpreted rather than quoted. The olive trees that grew on the site before the work began were lifted and replanted, either into the house’s own grove or back onto neighbouring farmland.
The rooms
There are 20 suites, 17 of them with private plunge pools. Each starts at 140 square metres — 50 indoors, and 90 given over to a private garden terrace facing the water. The Signature Villa is the largest of them at 380 square metres, 160 within and 220 without, with a private infinity pool and its own rooftop solar panels, which power it entirely.
The table
The kitchen is Anemoia, built on a zero-waste principle and a plant-forward menu, drawing on an edible garden on the property and on seasonal produce from the surrounding farmland. Food scraps are managed back into the kitchen rather than out of it. It is an unusual thing to find at this scale in western Crete, where the good cooking has traditionally been in the villages rather than in the houses that look at them.
The spa
Thaleria is set underground, where the temperature holds without asking anything of a compressor. It carries an indoor magnesium pool, chromotherapy showers, a steam room and a sauna, with treatment rooms alongside; a yoga terrace sits on the roof, in the open air.
The stewardship
The house runs on photovoltaic panels and draws on the thermal mass of the subsoil for what the sun does not cover. Water is held down by low-flow fittings and by planting only native Greek flora, which asks little of irrigation. The timber in the rooms is FSC-certified and was made up by a carpenter 7.3 kilometres from the gate. The sustainability strategy was advised by Professor Agis M. Papadopoulos of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki — which is to say it was designed in, at the point where the drawings were made, rather than added afterwards as a credential.
What Tella Thera proposes is that a house can be built on a Greek hillside without announcing itself on the skyline, and that the restraint is the point rather than the cost of it. For those who would take the quiet end of Crete, the introduction is ours to make.
