The fox in the marble henhouse | New Hotel, Athens

“Friends owns it,” said Yannos Hadjiioannou, with the nonchalance of someone who knows the provenance of every feta in the Peloponnese. “Well located. And the design’s been ahead of its time for years.” He is co-founder of Maltby & Greek, which imports Greece’s most elegant wines and artisanal ephemera to Britain – a modern-day Dionysus in denim.

The original carcass was the Olympic Palace, a post-war slab, once home to men in suits and heft glasses, and women in stiff hair

New Hotel. The name alone ought to be warning enough. In Athens – a city with more past than several religions, and more ruins than rainy Tuesdays in Stoke – calling your hotel ‘New’ is tantamount to naming your child ‘Now’. It’s immodest. It’s a marketing fib daubed on a skyline written in columns and conquest. And yet here it is, pretending to be a hotel, behaving like an artwork, slipping between the Doric and the dystopian with the ease of a fox infiltrating a henhouse.

The original carcass was the Olympic Palace, a post-war slab, once home to men in suits and heft glasses, and women in stiff hair, attending conferences with titles like Hydroelectric Futures ‘71. That building is still here, in skeletal outline, though now it has been pulled apart and reassembled by the Campana brothers, Humberto and Fernando – those joyfully deranged Brazilian apostles of design detritus – who decorate as if they’ve lost a bet with gravity and won a war against symmetry.

Inside, furniture made from other, worse furniture skitters across the lobby like ghosts of IKEA’s guilty past to become trees where you have breakfast. Bannisters twitch like syntax in translation. Chairs dare you to sit – or to think about sitting. It is a bricolage of near collapses held together by nerve and glue and the persistent presence of aesthetic peril.

Presiding over all this is Dakis Ioannou, a Greek Cypriot industrialist with the ambition to out-collect every collector. He is what you’d get if Aristotle ran a hedge fund and curated Art Basel in his spare time. Ioannou owns the hotel, as well as the DESTE Foundation, a yacht designed by Jeff Koons called Guilty, and presumably several careers of artists not yet born. His art collection is staged across New Hotel like breadcrumbs for the culturally ravenous – pieces by Malvina Panagiotidi and Petros Moris stare back at you from odd angles: Vein II, Future Bestiary, More Answers Without Questions. All of them intoning: “You don’t understand me, and that’s the point.”

Upstairs, rooms are punishingly beautiful. Blinds operate with the moral ambiguity of Sophocles. A golden basin, carved like a faceted diamond, dares to be used. The bed is suspiciously perfect, like a bureaucrat’s alibi. The toiletries – all fig and sin – hint at licentious Greek gods in bathing suits. Our studio overlooked the Russian Church of Sotira Lykodimou and the National Gardens – a view so Athenian you half-expect Pericles to pop by with olives and a stern word. Junior suites come with their own PlayStation, because irony sleeps soundly here.

The seventh-floor Art Lounge is a salon with a view – the Acropolis, of course, if you lean, that great sunbaked ruin, smouldering like history on fire. The penthouse suite next door shares this gaze, though perhaps with more alcohol and fewer interruptions. Inside, the Lounge offers cocktails, manifestos, and 2,000 books nobody quite finishes. It is a place where ideas go to flirt, quarrel, and overstay their visa.

You might wake up married to a nymph. You might not wake up at all.

Food is conducted – not merely cooked – by Babis Kountouris, suspiciously briefly of Le Bristol (Paris, not Somerset), and more substantially of Galazia Hytra. He excels despite the logistical absurdity of his kitchen being eight floors below the dining room – a daily feat of edible theatre performed with no visible strain. Dishes are Greek, but not really. Shrimps from Amvrakikos Bay arrive in a red pepper coulis so vibrant it surely has its own agent. Moussaka appears in the guise of Black Angus, like a cow which read Plato. Iberico pork plays dress-up as gyros, managing to insult nobody and intrigue everyone.

The wine list reads like a jazz set: Assyrtiko by Maltby & Greek client, Paris Sigalas, the volcanic viticulturalist of Santorini, whose bottles erupt with geological poise. Finish with Tsipouro aged long enough to have voted twice. The Aegean Breeze, a potion as blue as the Greek flag involving mastiha, lavender and honeyed Ouzo, is as close as a drink gets to a fevered reimagining of Narcissus. You might wake up married to a nymph. You might not wake up at all.

Outside, Athens grumbles and struts. Plaka leans towards ruin with the panache of a socialite on her third divorce. Monastiraki sings its Byzantine bric-a-brac market opera. Psiri, that scuffed-up corner of louche defiance, chain smokes, shrugs, and remembers things better than you do.

But it is the internal contradiction of New Hotel which earns it cult status. A guesthouse which collects you, a room in a city, and the city in a room. There are sharp lines and soft lighting, seriousness laced with silliness, and chairs which will wound you if you look away. All of it – except for one artwork flashing the word ‘APPLAUSE’ like a knowing prompt – is draped in the confidence of design which doesn’t ask to be liked. It presumes affection and usually gets it.

And about that name. New. No, it isn’t. (It opened in 2011, and Fernando Campana died in 2022). But yes, it is. In Athens, nothing is ever entirely one thing. Every column has served as pagan altar, Byzantine chapel, goat shelter, or revolutionary printing press. To be new here is to acknowledge one’s reincarnations and to laugh in the face of linear time. As the Roman poet Erasmus later recorded from Aesop’s tradition, “Vulpes pilum mutat, non mores” – “The fox may change its fur, but not its nature.” And this hotel, dear reader, is that fox – clever, elusive, and slinking through history with a designer lampshade on its head. C

New Hotel,
16 Filellinon Street, Syntagma, Athens, 10557
 donkeyhotels.gr

Follow Douglas Blyde @douglasblyde