Postcard from Greece . . . meeting the 100-year-old guru of hotel design

To visit Delphi is to travel back in time. Not to the 6th century BC — when the Pythian oracle dispensed prophetic hexameters to the throngs who came to consult her — but to the 1960s, the golden age of Greek tourism. Vintage ads for Kodak film hang above souvenir shops peddling museum replicas. Retro signs in Hellenistic font herald guesthouses named after every Greek god and demigod under the sun. The classiest place to stay is the Amalia Delphi, a modernist masterpiece designed in 1963 by Nicos Valsamakis — arguably Greece’s greatest living architect and still working despite celebrating his 100th birthday in July.

When the hotel was built, there was nothing around but antiquities and empty fields. Angular and elongated, its white reinforced concrete must have made quite a statement among the ruins. “There were no hotels in Delphi back then,” Valsamakis recalls. “We had to stay in [the nearby village of] Arachova while construction was taking place. There was a pigsty below my bedroom, and the floors were wooden so you could hear and smell the pigs. All hotels in Greece were like that after the war.”

Sixty years on, the Amalia Delphi still cuts a dash. The open-plan lobby and living room stretches to full-height windows, which draw in the shimmering sweep of the Crissaean plain — an expanse of olive groves dropping to the flat sheen of the distant sea. Much of the original furniture, all designed by Valsamakis himself, is intact, including the striking floating fireplace, the shapely wooden bar stools, the low-slung armchairs and the wood-panelled front desk. Most of the warm, friendly staff have also been around for decades, adding to the sense of entering another era.

The sharp modernist geometries are softened with traditional materials. Wide stairs of grey-green Pelion stone lead to the guestrooms, in two separate wings. Sadly, the bedrooms have been largely stripped of their vintage charm, save for the hand-painted tiles by the 20th century artist Yannis Moralis mounted on the roughly plastered walls. Elsewhere, eagle-eyed design aficionados will spot decorative ceramics by Eleni Vernadaki, another of Valsamakis’s peers, who is still going strong in her nineties.

Valsamakis is Greece’s answer to Oscar Niemeyer or IM Pei and as prolific as ever. He commutes daily from his acclaimed house in the Athenian suburb of Filothei (another 1960s landmark, which graced the cover of Taschen’s One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects of the Twentieth Century) to his office in the downtown Kolonaki district.

He does not have a website and rarely gives talks or interviews. He prefers the buildings to speak for themselves

The lower-ground-floor practice is as modest and discreet as the man himself. When I finally find the entrance, Valsamakis is waiting to greet me personally in the plant-filled atrium. He looks dapper in a sweater and button-down shirt, his silver hair neatly swept back from his high forehead. He works with a tiny team of architects and archivists in the low, book-lined space. Although Valsamakis has designed and built over 300 houses, apartment buildings, hotels, banks, schools, and villas since he set up his practice in 1953, he does not have a website and rarely gives talks or interviews. He prefers the buildings to speak for themselves.

Among the most notable examples is 5 Semitelou Street, the first modern polikatoikia (multistorey apartment building) in Athens. Valsamakis was a third-year student at Athens Polytechnic when he designed the building in 1951. “I had just been discharged from the army and my friend, who was the engineer, was still doing his three-year military service. We didn’t have any money. But we were in a hurry as we were desperate to be the first to build a block of flats in Greece,” says Valsamakis.

“We saw this plot of land for sale and found out the owner was Dr Louros, the physician to the king and queen. ‘One of you is a student and the other is a conscript. Why on earth would I trust you to build me a block of flats?’ he told us. But in the end, Louros agreed and kept one floor for his private practice. One day, he called me to complain that the elevator was not big enough for the royal family and their entourage.”

Over the years, Valsamakis built four other hotels for the Amalia chain, founded by the mercurial entrepreneur, Christos Coulouvatos. Located near to major tourism sites — the Acropolis, Olympia, Nafplion and Meteora — each hotel reflects the local context, character, and the time it was built. The Amalia Athens, which still stands opposite the National Gardens, made waves in 1957 with its daring white marble façade. “We did a mock-up room and the whole Coulouvatos family showed up to approve the furnishing — uncles, siblings, cousins, wives. They couldn’t believe there was no headboard, no chintz,” Valsamakis recalls with a wry smile. Eventually, the jury reached a verdict: “We’ve been modernised!”

The Amalia Olympia, built in 1977, is arguably the best preserved. Designed on a brilliant white grid, with long passageways and irregular apertures that reveal glimpses of yellow, terracotta and blue woodwork, from a distance it looks like a Mondrian painting. After half a century, it still feels timeless and current. “All the Amalia hotels follow the same logic: a hotel is just a big house with lots of bedrooms,” Valsamakis explains. “It’s essentially a home where people should feel welcome.”

Over the past decade, Valsamakis has focused his attention on holiday villas. Although none are quite as daring as the pair of houses in Anavyssos he created for two of his closest friends in the early ‘60s, his recent villas have the same uncompromising integrity and unpretentious atmosphere. Some of them (like the VLS villa on Antiparos, and Iriana in Porto Heli) are available to rent. Now Valsamakis is working on an ambitious, 94-key hotel project on Mykonos, due to launch next year as the island’s first Four Seasons resort. It is intended as an homage to the island’s traditional architecture: Valsamakis hopes it will look like a Cycladic village that has always been there.

I wonder whether the grandfather of Greek hotel design ever goes on holiday or stays at his own hotels. Valsamakis smiles. “I’m always on holiday. My work is pleasure.”

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