This extraordinary apartment offers a rare opportunity to combine a stay in one of the city’s more attractive 1920s bourgeois-era apartment buildings alongside a bird’s-eye-view of an emblematic Athenian square hosting both the marble-clad, fully-restored church of Ayios Konstantinos and the Viennese-inspired National Theater.
The incredibly compact, well-equipped and finely-designed space is split into three well-packed units that take care of sleep, work and bodily needs (the extraordinary bathroom, designed around a standalone washbasin and featuring a vast shower space is so impressive that it alone makes booking the apt worth it). A cunningly-secreted kitchenette tucked into a smooth, wooden cupboard partition, adjoins the living-room/workspace which in turn leads out onto the terrace and building’s rooftop. The cosy bedroom – really more of a sleeping cubhole – is especially suited to cosy winter hibernations. Waking up to a rainstorm in progress, with water lashing the panes of this liminal space suspended between sky and city, is one of the great pleasures one can experience in Athens.
The surrounding district is replete with the faded glory of metropolitan 1920s Athens, and today has evolved into a Little Batumi, being the center of the city’s ethnic Georgian community. You can get delicious khachapouri with cheese, mashed beans or meat in the tavern just next to the building, and late afternoons on the vast terrace overlooking the square’s bustle are soundtracked to Georgian music playing in the building opposite, where there’s some kind of community center.
If you want to see an Athens that remains largely unknown to outsiders, and mixes C19th century cosmopolitanism with C21st multiculturalism, while still being a short walk away from touristic sights, this is an ingenious and little-known bolthole from which to do so.