Piraeus · Athens
Sympan.
Four rooms above a gallery, in a Piraeus port building that kept its patina.
Sympan is a café-bar, gallery and four-room residency at 7 Aitolikou Street in Agios Dionysios, Piraeus. Kosmas Karavas — the designer behind Lab Piree and Pirée — opened it in September 2026 inside an old residence wrapped in an industrial shell, converted by cube architects. Exhibitions rotate on the Load/Unload cycle; the rooms upstairs are all called Kamara.
"Sleep in a Kamara. Come down for coffee among whatever was loaded in this week."
Sympan sits at no. 7 Aitolikou Street in Agios Dionysios, the working grid of streets behind the Piraeus port. From the street it reads as an industrial shell. Inside is an old residence that was kept rather than erased: concrete, steel and exposed brick, the patina left where time put it. In the 1940s and 1950s the building ran as a café and taverna, with rooms upstairs for port workers. cube architects handled the conversion. It opened on 17 September 2026.
It is the latest move by Kosmas Karavas, the Piraeus designer behind Lab Piree, the materials showroom on Dragatsaniou, and Pirée, the gallery-bar on Kastoros. Sympan folds those threads into one address: a ground-floor café-bar and gallery, an open kitchen built around plates for sharing, and a planted courtyard under an exposed space-frame roof. Programming runs on Load/Unload — a port metaphor. Designers and artists load in, show for roughly 25 days, then unload for the next. The current cycle, Load/Unload 2: Memory Manual, curated by Athena Lasithiotaki, runs until 13 November 2026.
Upstairs are four rooms, all called Kamara, each designed differently by the Lab Piree Superstudio team. They work as short-stay residencies rather than hotel rooms: you sleep above the exhibition and take breakfast coffee in the gallery. The ferry gates are close enough to make it a sensible base before an early boat — and a reason to see Piraeus as more than a place to leave from.
2026
Since
4
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