Our story
The house was a pumice store, and then it was nothing for fifty years
Everything here was built to move rock. We kept the walls, the arches and the sea, and changed almost nothing else.
Firopotamos shipped pumice from 1904 until the quarry closed in 1961. This building was the store: two long vaulted halls, a loading arch cut through to the water, and nothing else, because nothing else was needed.
It stood empty for fifty-seven years. The roof went in 1978. By the time it was bought, in 2018, three of the vaults had fallen and a fig tree was growing through the north wall.
What we did, and what we did not
The rebuild took twenty-two months and two archaeologists, one of whom stopped the work for six weeks over a wall that turned out to be nineteenth-century. Every arch that was standing is the original. The three that had gone were rebuilt in the same stone by two masons from Sifnos, and you can tell which they are if you look at the joints.
We did not add a lift, a conference room, or a fourth floor. Fourteen rooms is what the building holds without cutting the vaults about, so fourteen is what there is.
The fig tree is still in the north wall. It is the one in the courtyard, and it fruits in August.
People ask what the concept is. There is no concept. It is a building that was here, a cook who is very good, and six people who live on this island in the winter.
The house in numbers
Who runs it
Six people, three of them born in the village
Eleni cooks. Maria and Eleni — a different Eleni — are the spa. Stelios fishes and drives. Yannis, who is not the Yannis from the mines, keeps the building standing. Anna runs reception and the whole thing.
In winter the hotel closes and everybody does something else. That is not a hardship we are dressing up; it is how an island of five thousand people works.
What we are trying not to become
There is a version of this island coming that has a helipad at Adamas and a beach club at Firiplaka, and there is nothing we can do about it. What we can do is stay fourteen rooms, keep the prices where an ordinary person can reach them in May, and go on buying from the same eleven people.
We are aware that every hotel says something like this. Ours is checkable: the prices are on the room pages, in public, for every month of the season.