The first international flight I took post-2020 landed in Santorini. I arrived with friends from the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (a favorite), and there were meetings with archaeologists and private tours of the ancient city of Akrotiri scheduled, even a guided hike up the volcano. I was there because it had been too long since I breathed Greek air and because time with Tina and Panos is never boring. But if I’m being honest, the reason I immediately accepted the invitation and muted the naysayers and my own anxiety was because I knew a trip to this mythical island in the Aegean Sea would mean a return to Perivolas.
I first visited this hotel, a series of white houses carved into the cliffs in the village of Oia, about 20 years ago. “It was an invitation,” Costis Psychas, son of Perivolas founders Nadia and Manos and the unwavering guiding force of the place, tells me, “and it became a business.” Manos was a sea captain who had been brought up in Odessa but felt the call of Santorini, birthplace of his father. He and his wife Nadia, whose aesthetic, a belief in the power of island simplicity, still rules in every room, returned in the 1960s and bought a piece of land at the top of Oia, near the homes of the local fishermen and among stables and wine cellars.
They began to restore the 300-year-old caves around them and made the first houses, Psychas says, “for their friends to experience the spirit of this island.” Perivolas, the hotel, just four small rooms, welcomed its first guests in 1983. There are now 21 houses and an infinity pool that has launched thousands of Greek island fantasies around the world. Across the way, on the largely uninhabited island of Therasia, Psychas built what is known as the Hideaway in 2011 out of an old pumice mine that juts directly into the Aegean. It is, he says, “a place for someone who wants to see the island from a distance, and wants true privacy, but still be a five-minute boat ride away from Santorini.”
If that sounds like your Mediterranean dream, it sleeps eight. But if your fantasy of your own “little house on Santorini” is privacy, an infinity pool, the sunset, views from every corner, room service, and an easy walk into the village of Oia (if you can ever move from your sun lounger or stop staring at the sea), now there is that here, too. The Perivolas Villa was completed in 2020 on a piece of land next door to the main hotel, a plot that long belonged to the family and had once been a small vineyard. Why now? “We work on our own rhythm,” Psychas says. “We are in no rush. We want to enjoy the creation.”
As with every single thing created at Perivolas, the island—its history, its natural resources, and its artisans—determined all. The new two-bedroom villa is as deeply connected to the land as the hotel rooms built directly into it. It was, like them, created by traditional local workers. “We don’t bring anyone in. We study the old buildings and especially the village of Oia. We use local materials. And the whole house comes out of the pool. Look outside any window and you can see it. And the pool is connected out into the water of the caldera, out into the Aegean Sea.”
Psychas is an evangelist of a kind of divine simplicity. The scheme is gray and white, the floors pristine white marble. “We don’t decorate the walls,” Psychas points out. “We don’t even have corners. It is like sculpture, smooth and round and as simple as possible.”
Given the mythology around Santorini, the belief that it was the city of Atlantis before a volcanic eruption that birthed a legend and a legendary view, anything that springs from the island comes with a kind of magic. But there is something else here at Perivolas. It is an all powerful belief in doing something perfect, but nothing more.
Yes, I know there are other beautiful and less crowded islands, and I go to them. There are also wonderful things to do on Santorini. Definitely visit Akrotiri, and definitely have dinner at Ari Vezene’s new restaurant in the hotel Cavo Tagoo. (Rumor is there may soon be a Nobu on the island, too.) Go down to Ammoudi and eat at one of the traditional tavernas there. Walk the village of Oia and go see Tony at Ambrosia & Nectar.
But if there are days when you can’t bear to leave Perivolas, well, really, there is no need. The food is excellent, and you can see the sunset from here. I’ve tried to explain it since my first visit, but now, after seeing the new house, anyone who asks me the question, “Should I go to Santorini?” can expect the reply, “Only if you avoid August and only if you stay at Perivolas.”
I ask Psychas how he plans to pass on the philosophy of the family business to the next generation that I met at the hotel this year. Think about this the day you arrive at Perivolas; maybe say it out loud from your place at the villa, while holding a glass of cold assyrtiko and gazing out at the caldera.
“The good light, the good view, the water, the simplicity,” he says. “Choose what is most important and do nothing more.”
Perivolas Villa, $5,000 per night, two-night minimum. Season starts May 1. perivolas.gr
This story appears in the March 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Editor-in-Chief Stellene Volandes is a jewelry expert, and the author of Jeweler: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Design (Rizzoli).
