In May 2025 Parīlio set out the largest change to the house since it opened in 2019: an enlarged Elios Spa, and 13 new villas and suites, both of which opened in June 2025. The property stands at Kolympithres on the northern shore of Paros, below Naoussa, and now counts 46 suites and villas in all. For six years it had been read as a design address. It left the 2025 season as a wellness one.
What opened at Kolympithres
The spa is the quieter half of the announcement and the more consequential one. Elios at Parīlio holds 4 treatment rooms, each with its own shower and changing area, an outdoor heated jacuzzi, and a terrace given to relaxation. The treatment menu is drawn from the natural resources of the Cyclades — facial and body work built on the Aegean rather than lifted from a brand counter. The rooms keep to 10am until 7pm. The fitness centre beside them, fitted with Technogym treadmills, ellipticals, rowing and cycling machines, stays open around the clock and costs the guest nothing.
Four rooms is a restrained number for a house of 46 keys, and that is the point of it. A spa scaled to fill itself has to be sold; a spa scaled below its house is simply there when a guest wants it, which is the only version of the thing that reads as luxury rather than as an amenity.
The signature the group carries
Elios — the sun — is not a name invented for Paros. Every Empiria Group hotel carries an Elios Spa and fitness centre, in the group’s own words a sanctuary given to relaxation and purposeful well-being; at Vedema on Santorini it occupies a wine cellar a century old. What Kolympithres gained in 2025 was the group’s house standard, finally built out at the scale the property had grown into.
The lineage behind it is unusually direct. Antonis Eliopoulos bought a neoclassical mansion in the Santorini village of Megalochori in 1989 and a winery the year after; Vedema, the first hotel, opened in 1993. With Kalia Konstantinidou he built the group out across the Cyclades, trading as Kanava Hotels and Resorts until 2023, when the business took the name Empiria Group at its thirtieth anniversary. Parīlio, in 2019, was the first address away from Santorini — the house calls Paros a gateway to the real Cyclades — and it opened as the first branded five-star hotel on the island.
The 13
The suites and villas divide cleanly by how much of the house a guest wants around them. Eclipse and Iris are the signature suites, of 1 and 2 bedrooms, each with a private terrace and a shared plunge pool. Aurelia is a villa of 3 bedrooms with a private infinity pool and a full kitchen. Jupiter, at 5 bedrooms, is the largest retreat on the property: kitchen, infinity pool, and open-air rooms for the kind of gathering a hotel suite cannot hold. All of them keep the privileges of full hotel service, which is the harder half of the trick — seclusion is easy to build and expensive to staff.
The drawings are by Interior Design Laboratorium, the Athens studio that has worked across the group’s houses and drew Vedema, Mystique, Istoria, Cosme and Parīlio itself. The vocabulary is the one the house already spoke — local stone, wood, stonewashed concrete, Cycladic restraint carried into rooms rather than applied to their surfaces. Ecoscapes took the landscape, planting to native species to cut irrigation, with a private water well in the plan for self-sufficiency.
Why it matters on Paros
Paros has spent a decade acquiring the addresses that Mykonos and Santorini acquired a generation earlier, and doing it more quietly. Empiria now holds three positions on the island — Parīlio, Cosme, and Acron Villas — which is less a portfolio than a settled view of where the Cyclades are going. The kitchen at Parōn, under executive chef Thanos Feskos, was refreshed in the same season.
The wellness half is the part worth watching. A design hotel is a room; a spa is a reason to stay a second week, and it is the reason a family takes a 5-bedroom villa rather than two suites for four nights. Parīlio spent 2025 building the second of those, and the villas will be measured against it.
The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
