The Dolli at Acropolis is a boutique hôtel-maison at Mitropoleos 49, Athens, a few streets below the rock it is named for. It holds 46 bedrooms, pieds-a-terre and apartments, sized and furnished the way a home would be, and it is Grecotel S.A.’s first opening of this kind.
The building is the reason to go. It is a listed mansion whose ornament survived decades of other use, and the restoration kept what it found. Original works by Picasso and Modigliani hang inside, and the rooftop restaurant looks straight at the Parthenon.
The mansion and its architects
Andreas Kriezis drew the house in the 1920s. He was born on Hydra in 1887, studied architecture in Munich and died in 1962, and his later work turned the Athenian royal palace into the Hellenic Parliament building. The magnate Dimitrios Kallimasiotis entrusted the design of his mansion to him, and the house that resulted dates to 1925, in Plaka. Kriezis worked in the eclectic manner, taking ornament and structural elements from several eras at once, and the façade still shows it in the arches, the imposing windows and the striking moulding.
From the mid-1930s the building was a fabric emporium, a use that kept the shell standing while the interiors went. By the time Grecotel S.A. took it on, the mansion was more than 100 years old, listed and decaying behind a protected front. Seven years, from 2016, is the span the house gives for conception and renovation together. Mari N. Daskalantonaki, the group’s managing director, took on the investment at the start of it, and The Dolli opened on 1 January 2023.
What the restoration kept
The owners kept the decorative patterns they found. The clearest is the Sun of Vergina, the ancient Macedonian emblem, held in the ceiling motifs of the lobby and halls, where a guest meets it by looking up on the way in. It is one of many such patterns the eclectic scheme left through the building.
The interiors were worked up as a residence rather than a hotel: the lobby reads as a salon, the lounges as a library and a bar. Rooms and suites take the same line, the Acropolis Pied-à-Terre among them. Eating and drinking are in DOLLI’S rooftop restaurant, Le Salon, Le Bar Secret, and the last two of those are rooms inside the house.
The roof
The rooftop was the neglected part of the building, and the restoration treated it as a fundamental space. Stelios Kois, a contemporary Greek architect, worked to one instruction from the owner, ‘understatement’: austere curved forms in travertine marble, subtle colour and sculptural bronze lights, with the view left to carry the room. From the tables the Parthenon is unobstructed, and so are the Ancient and Roman Agoras, the Temple of Athena Nike, the Tower of the Winds and Philopappos Hill. An infinity pool takes the same skyline on its water.
Greek indigenous varieties open the wine list, which runs on through the renowned wineries and labels from abroad, and the sommelier is the way through it. Lunch is served from 1pm to 4.30pm and dinner from 7pm to 11pm. One table up there, the Maestro Table, is laid for a single couple each evening, through the year and weather permitting.
The art
The works on show are originals: Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Lucio Fontana, Amedeo Modigliani, with designer pieces by Les Lalanne and Alexander Calder. Greek and Egyptian antiquities, rare editions and artefacts sit among them, in the guest rooms as well as the public spaces.
Who is this for
A guest who wants to walk the city and sleep inside its history. Everything is on foot from the door, the rock included, and Plaka’s courtyards and ancient monuments start at the corner. Inside, the light is golden and white through the tall windows, and each object in the entrance has a story attached to it. The scale suits a couple who like an evening with company: on Thursdays a DJ, signature drinks and the chef’s sharing menu on the roof.
