Athens, Rebuilt Room by Room

For most of the last century Athens was a city people passed through on the way to the islands. The financial crisis changed that in a roundabout way: property emptied, rents collapsed, and a generation of Greek architects and designers who might otherwise have left found they could afford to build in the centre. What followed is one of the more convincing urban revivals in Europe — not a museum restoration, but a working city with better hotels than it has ever had. Most of them occupy buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, when Athens built in Art Deco, Bauhaus, and a local neoclassical idiom all at once.

Perianth Hotel

A 1930s Art Deco building on Agias Eirinis Square, where the Greek practice K-Studio has set thirty-eight rooms in muted green and grey, terrazzo underfoot and brass catching the light. The square below is the best people-watching in the centre, and the hotel opens onto it rather than hiding from it. The clearest statement of what contemporary Athenian design looks like.

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Shila Athens

Six one-of-a-kind suites in a 1920s neoclassical residence in Kolonaki — French windows, a rooftop garden, and a library lounge that kept its original mosaic floors. Six keys in the city's most elegant neighbourhood, run with the informality of a guesthouse. If you want to understand how Athenians of a certain generation actually lived, this is the building to sleep in.

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Apollo Palm Hotel

Two whitewashed Bauhaus-style buildings in the centre, warmed with yellow and pale green, serving organic wine in the courtyard and tapas on the roof with Balearic music running late. Forty-eight rooms, relaxed, and priced sensibly. The roof faces the Acropolis, which in Athens is less a luxury than a baseline expectation — but this one is genuinely good.

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Ergon Bakehouse Athens

A downtown bakery that is also a hotel: twenty-nine rooms in cream and dark wood above a working bakehouse, with breads and pastries at 72Η Eatery and more refined al-fresco plates on the rooftop. The smell of the ground floor reaches the first-floor corridor in the morning, which is either the finest amenity in Athens or a reason to request a higher room.

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One&Only Aesthesis

Not in the city at all, but twenty minutes south on the Athens Riviera: 127 mid-century rooms in earthy tones and exposed stone across twenty-one hectares of private waterfront, with its own beach and Ora's Greek-Italian table. The site was a legendary 1960s beach club, and the new building keeps that low, horizontal, sun-bleached posture. The right pairing for two city nights followed by two by the sea.

One&Only AesthesisAthens, GreeceSee the hotel →

Athens works best in spring and autumn — July and August are hot enough to flatten a day, and much of the centre empties out anyway as the city decamps to the islands. Stay in Koukaki, Kolonaki, or around Agias Eirinis; all three are walkable to the Acropolis, and the last two have the better dinners.