One&Only Aesthesis.

The Athens Riviera got its first One&Only in 2024, and it landed on loaded ground. This is the old Asteria Beach — in the 1960s a playground for socialites and starlets, its modernist cabanas and open-air restaurants the backdrop to a run of black-and-white Greek films. Rather than erase that, the resort follows the low-density blueprint of the original: bungalows and villas in local stone and pale timber, scattered between dense gardens and the shoreline, every one with its own pool.

The water is the one honest caveat — the bay is shallow, better for paddleboarding or launching toward Aegina and Kea than for a serious swim. Everything else is engineered for staying put. Ora runs all day as a Greco-Italian open-kitchen affair, eggplant and lobster and lamb going into the wood fire; El Bar is chef Paco Morales's take on an Andalusian tapas bar, Iberico and escabeche oysters with sherry cocktails; Manco keeps the beach in daytime-drinking-into-sunset-DJ mode. The Guerlain Spa handles the recovery.

A resort so rigorously art-directed it sometimes feels like a film set — which, given the site, is almost the point.

It is a resort, not a hideaway, and it reads as a statement about the coastline: proof the Riviera can hold a global luxury brand without surrendering the low-slung, pine-and-stone character that made Asteria worth remembering. Ten miles from the centre — close enough to treat the city as a day trip, far enough to forget it.