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Two designers have restored a historic home from its roots, all things contemporary, and then added their own spirit to foreign influences.
By Kurt Sóller
Photos via Bastian Achard
Produced by Christophe Garis
THEY CALL it the Island of Revelation, because it was here on Patmos, in the southeast corner of what is now Greece, that the apostle John predicted the end of the global, or less, edition recorded in the Book of Revelation of the Bible. John had been exiled in 95 AD. This piece of land not far from where the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean meet across the Romans, who were not only threatened by the growing influence of Christianity, but believed it to be a cult. However, the Byzantine Empire prevailed, and with it Greek Orthodoxy, and then, in 1088, the monastery dedicated to St. John emerged, a fortified complex of marble and local andesite (a volcanic rock), built on one of the highest peaks on the planet. Patmos, this would forever replace the island’s fortunes.
For a few hundred years, the Church poured in cash, eager to expand its influence in the Dodecanese, the organization of islands so close to Turkey that on a map it looks like a necklace of jewels wrapped around it. of the southwestern coast of the country. Pilgrims seeking enlightenment or safe refuge (since the fall of Constantinople and the decline of Cretan influence) temporarily settled in Chora (Greek for “city”) of this island. shadow of the monastery. Patmos continued to expand in the fashionable era as a position of trade and intercultural flows: prosperity and geography made it an ideal position for navigation, as ships brought wooden furniture from Venice and crafts from Istanbul and Cairo. . In the 15th century, wealthy immigrants and merchants built small churches and block dwellings that still crowd the narrow, steep roads of Chora. Although in history various intruders (pirates, Ottoman expansionists and Nazis) have claimed this territory as their own, Patmos has belonged to Greece since the late 1940s. Greeks and tourists enjoy it not only for its preserved architecture and Christian traditions ( dozens of priests and nuns still worship there), but also for its pebble coves and its quiet beaches, its hills full of goats and its probably infinite blue, where the sky gives way to the sea. Array
In fact, Patmos is so pristine that in recent years wealthy families from all over Europe and Asia have begun choosing it as a location for their vacation homes. The Aga Khan family owns an estate in the most attractive UNESCO-protected enclave of Chora, with its many centuries-old stone dwellings, all whitewashed each summer with chalk paint with antibacterial and cooling properties. Many local families who had settled after World War II sold their homes to those in Athens and elsewhere who waited years. to locate suitable Chora houses, which the new owners mix together to create sprawling villas.
Athenian interior designer Dimitris Pantazopoulos, 60, began visiting Patmos in 2001, after becoming “fascinated by the indigenous architecture of the houses,” he says. He befriended the 73-year-old Greek-born, Italy-based Italian architect Themistocle Antoniadis, a well-regarded elder in the Patmian recovery scene, and they eventually began collaborating. “Our partnership flows like a river,” says Antoniadis, and about ten years ago the two decided to take over “one of the largest and most vital houses in Patmos,” as he calls it, belonging to a European family. for whom Pantazopoulos redesigned and redecorated several projects throughout Greece. At over 7,500 square feet, adding a two-bedroom guest annex across the street, the assets stand out for their length and location: situated just below the monastery, it is one of the tallest and tallest structures on Patmos and offers amazing panoramic views. of the mountainous south coast from its terraces. With its gabled roof, one of three in Chora, it is also one of the oldest properties, with parts dating back to the 16th century.
“NO ONE KNOWS what the space is like,” Pantazopoulos says one September afternoon as he opens the interior wooden shutters of the main space, filling it with warm afternoon light. When his clients combined the two buildings in the last decade, his designs were messy and labyrinthine, like Chora itself. Pantazopoulos concentrated the structures around a few outdoor spaces and open, oblong rooms, cutting away the French tiles and plastered and painted walls that the previous owners had installed in the 1990s. Local craftsmen stripped and whitewashed all interior surfaces. stone and, for the main building’s ground floor and kitchen countertops, Pantazopoulos sourced and installed a pile of original 20th-century Patmian terracotta tiles, featuring finger waves or hand-stamped designs, and a variegated patina black, red and brown from hardening in a wood oven. Although there is an iron forge on the 13-square-mile island, which has a population of about 3,000, Pantazopoulos had to make the nine-foot-tall arched glass and steel door that leads from the living room to the central courtyard. , where he also uncovered an 1,100-pound slab of marble to create an outdoor dining table.
“It’s hard for paintings to look old,” he says, especially since Chora’s state of preservation meant that no walls could be moved. Instead, the architectural interventions have largely taken the form of reclaimed wood, long considered a rarefied curtain on an island devoid of forests. In a guest bedroom in the annex, as well as on the ground floor of the main building, there are platforms of old, raw spruce on which Pantazopoulos placed mattresses tufted with faded fabrics. For the comfortable library on the first floor of the annex, he designed a mezzanine staircase, painted in bright ochers and running through the women’s mezzanine of an ancient Patmian church, to give some layout to the dome of the room (a unconsecrated chapel). But the most impressive of those additions is a carved wooden panel from the Ottoman era that, although it separates the main house’s small kitchen from the two living rooms beyond, does not reach 20 feet in height. It’s a moody petrol blue, one of several colors used sparingly but boldly in the area that evokes the island’s maritime era, when houses were painted with the remains of fishing boats.
The ornament also reflects the confluence of cultures and concepts that may only be the result of centuries of conquest, travel, and trade. In the master suite, for example, a Florentine four-poster bed and an antique canopy that Pantazopoulos had embroidered locally, a trio of 18th-century silver Turkish hand mirrors, a Corfu chest of drawers, an Italian Directory armchair, a custom-made corner sofa. Covered with striped textiles from England’s Robert Kime and several worn Anatolian kilims piled up on the ground. “For a space to have a soul,” says Pantazopoulos, “you build and you wait. “
And even if there is a certain formality — “an austerity,” he says — it’s mostly a position of relaxing and doing nothing. In most rooms, the seats are very low and deep, with fluffy cushions. You need a classic house, you never sit on the couches, you lie on them,” says Pantazopoulos. “Because once you get in, you’re tired,” especially during the hot, stressful summer months. But the owners also like They Come in Winter, when Chora is ghostly: empty and cold. They like to take a nap by the narrow, squat fireplace of the tea space, encouraged by ancient versions from the Epirus region, between Greece and Albania, for which the architects needed special permission. “The purpose is to do what the construction tells you to do,” says Pantazopoulos. “But a space has to be a dream. That’s it. “
Kurt Soller is an associate editor of T: The New York Times Style magazine. Learn More about Kurt Soller
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