Syntagma · Athens
New Hotel.
The Campana Brothers’ first hotel, assembled from the ruins of the one before it.
New Hotel occupies a midcentury building on Filellinon Street, steps from Syntagma Square. In 2011, São Paulo designers Fernando and Humberto Campana — their first hotel project — transformed the former Olympic Palace Hotel by salvaging everything inside it. The result: 79 rooms where a 1940s marble staircase survives intact and every fitting, chandelier, and surface is assembled from what the original building left behind.
"The first hotel the Campana Brothers ever designed, built from what the last one left behind."
New Hotel stands on Filellinon Street in a building that spent its previous decades as the Olympic Palace Hotel. When the owners commissioned Fernando and Humberto Campana to reimagine it in 2011, the São Paulo designers made an unexpected choice: rather than strip the building bare, they catalogued everything inside it first. The 1940s black marble staircase was kept in full. Everything else was dismantled, held, and worked back into the new interiors.
The Campana Brothers built their reputation on the Favela Chair — a piece assembled from offcuts of Brazilian timber that became an unlikely icon of high design. Their Athens project applies the same logic at scale. Chandeliers built from salvaged ecclesiastical metalwork. Chairs reupholstered in fragments of woven Greek textiles. Walls panelled with timber and stone recombined into dense, layered compositions. New Hotel is the first hotel either brother ever designed, and it remains one of the most genuinely unusual interiors in the city.
The 79 rooms sit across nine floors with views to Syntagma, the Acropolis, and — on clear days — the Aegean beyond. Rooftop pool and bar. Restaurant on the ground floor. The location — three minutes from the metro, seconds from the parliament — is hard to beat. But guests come for the rooms: each one handmade in a way most design hotels only claim.
2011
Since
79
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