Glyfada · Athens
Ace Hotel & Swim Club.
The Riviera, restored.
120 rooms on the Glyfada beachfront, inside the bones of the 1972 Fenix Hotel. Brutalist balconies, two pools, an art programme curated with Ateliers Ace. A 1970s Riviera reopened by Paris design studio Cigué.
"The 1972 Fenix Hotel, rebuilt by Paris studio Cigüé. The brutalist balconies survived."
Glyfada, the Athenian Riviera. Artemisiou 1, a hundred metres from the beach.
The bones are the 1972 Fenix Hotel — one of the Xenia-era hotels Greece built to host the world during the Riviera's first golden age. The cubic balconies are original. The brutalist mass is original. Everything else was opened up, gutted, and rebuilt by Paris design studio Ciguë and Georges Batzios Architects, using Aris Konstantinidis — the Greek modernist whose Anavyssos house defined this stretch of coast — as the north star.
Ciguë's move is to let the building be itself. The ground floor reads as one room: lobby, bistro (Sebastian, French-American, all-day), gallery, pool deck. Art everywhere — Callas brothers tapestries, a Fassianos print, a Sliepenbeek piece in hammered aluminium. Vintage furniture by Tobia Scarpa and Alessandro Becchi, sourced through Back To The Future. Custom bedspreads by Salma Barakat. Turntables and acoustic guitars in select rooms — the Ace signature, intact.
Two pools. The big one on the deck for the day, the small one on the roof for the hour before dinner. Stay through the sunset. The Glyfada light at six is the reason this building exists.
1975
Since
120
Keys
