Mandarin Oriental took Villa Aegean into its Exceptional Homes collection on 27 January 2025, as the 26th address in a line of private houses the company staffs to its own standard. The house stands at Imerovigli, above the caldera, Santorini.
Villa Aegean has five bedrooms, all en suite, and six bathrooms. A media room and a wine cellar sit inside. Outside there is a heated black-stone infinity pool, a rooftop lounge, a gym, a sauna and open ground for eating and sitting.
Exceptional Homes began in 2022 and held 25 houses before this one. Villa Aegean is the company’s second address on Santorini, after Villa Caldera, and it is sold inside a Greek itinerary that also takes in the group’s hotel at Costa Navarino, with a helicopter between the two.
The design
Elastic, a Greek studio, rebuilt and redesigned a villa that was already standing rather than starting on bare ground. The renovation was complete, and the studio ran it with Mandarin Oriental and with Vertus Santorini. Ria Vogiatzi Xenou, co-founder and chief executive of Elastic, led the design.
Basalt is at the centre of it. The studio took the life cycle of the island’s volcanic rock as the governing idea, from the stone at the moment of the eruption to the same stone weathered, and let each stage set a material, a colour and a form. Black stone accents went onto the existing footprint. The palette around them is natural tones with stone, metal and wood, worked against straight symmetrical lines.
An island house of the old kind was built tight, its doors and windows kept narrow so the rooms stayed cool. Elastic turned that habit into sculpture. The entrance curves, which catches the wind and moves air through the house, and gaps cut like fissures in rock bring light down into the rooms. Arches run through the house and outside it. Rooms cut below ground follow the canaves of Santorini, the cellars the island’s old estates dug into the rock, and they keep their cool the way the canaves do. Vaulted ceilings rise over interiors closer in feel to a city hotel suite than to an island house, and the pool, built in black stone, holds the sky on its surface.
“Our inspiration was the island’s distinct volcanic stone,” Vogiatzi Xenou said of the work. “We sought to craft a journey that flows with the fluidity of lava while narrating the timeless story of Santorini’s rich history.” Most houses built on the island keep to the traditional forms, Vogiatzi Xenou said, and this one was drawn to depart from them.
The service that comes with it
What the collection sells beyond the house is staff. Ersev Demiroz, the general manager of Mandarin Oriental Exceptional Homes, called it the group’s exceptional service: a chef on demand, housekeeping trained in a Mandarin Oriental hotel and a 24-hour concierge. Every house in the collection also carries a villa manager, and Demiroz said the managers do nothing other than look after the guests in the house they are posted to.
Villa Aegean can be let only through Exceptional Homes. What the group puts into the house is the standard and the people, and the roof-terrace dinner and the chef are sold on it as they are on Villa Caldera. Demiroz named health and safety as a second point of difference from the rest of the island’s rentals, fire safety above all.
Who is this for
This suits a group taking a whole house on Santorini with hotel staffing behind its own door. Imerovigli sits atop the cliffs, and it is where the island gathers for the sunset; the rooftop here is built to frame one. Oia, Fira, the wineries and the excavations at Akrotiri and Ancient Thera are all within reach. Requests the staff take on run from wine tastings and cooking classes to water sports, spa treatments and helicopter tours. September and October are the island’s off-season months.
