Esé Studio is the work of two people who should probably be described separately before being described together.
“S + A = esé. Inspired design and happy customers — if we can combine these two things, we’ve hit our mark.”
Sotiris Mallas — known as Sotos — is a Greek interior architect whose sensibility runs as much through fashion and design culture as through technical training. He has spent his career in Athens, building a practice anchored in hospitality and residential work, and is known for interiors that are materially precise without being cold — spaces that feel considered rather than engineered. Aaron Ritenour is an American architect based in Athens whose background is in architecture proper: award-winning work published in Dwell and Wohnrevue, a portfolio that ranges from Lycabettus penthouses to Paros beach houses to commercial projects across the city. The two had been collaborating informally for years before making it formal.
In 2011 they founded Esé Studio. The name is a phonetic rendering of their initials: S + A = esé. Their office sits at Vassilissis Sofias 62, in the stretch of the avenue between Kolonaki and the American Embassy that functions as an informal address for the city’s design and architecture practices. Their own description of the practice is characteristically plain: a Greek-American architecture and design office with a focus on homes, shops, bars, and offices. They believe in two things — inspired design and happy customers — and if those two things can coexist in a single project, they consider the job done.
What that combination of sensibilities produces in practice is interiors and buildings that handle architecture and interior design as a single problem rather than two separate commissions. The Musique Café in Athens — black and grey chequered floors, raw wood, industrial pendant lights arranged with precision — was an early calling card. Residential work followed across Athens and the islands, consistently material-specific and clean-lined, photographed by Ioanna Roufopoulou and published across European design press.
The Aigli Zappeiou commission in 2025, undertaken in collaboration with Neiheiser Argyros, was the most publicly significant project of their practice to date — and the Aigli Restaurant, specifically, is the room that best shows what Esé Studio does when given both scale and permission.
The starting point was the floor. The original red-and-white triangular-patterned marble had survived underneath successive layers of intervention and was revealed, restored, and refurbished rather than replaced — an act of archaeological patience that set the tone for every decision that followed. From that floor, the architects built upward: the triangular motif was extracted from the marble and redrawn in a new wood-inlay ceiling directly overhead, so that the pattern completes itself at both ends of the room, floor and ceiling in silent conversation across the space between them.
The walls are kept quieter. Rich materials — stone, wood, layered textiles — are used not to add decoration but to create depth, the kind of warmth that registers physically rather than visually. Along the edges of the room, generous curved yellow booths line the perimeter, their softness deliberate against the precision of the floor and ceiling. At the centre, a sculptural bar becomes the room’s hinge — the point around which everything else is organised, the place your eye goes before it knows why.
The restaurant seats 150 and offers views of both the Acropolis and the National Garden simultaneously — a view that took 120 years of Aigli’s history to make properly visible, because the room was only opened outward to the garden as part of this renovation. The design team described their approach as that of archaeologists and sociologists in equal measure: careful readers of what the building had been, attentive observers of what Athens is now. The Dezeen Awards 2025 shortlisted the project in the restaurant interior category. Architectural Record named Neiheiser Argyros in their Design Vanguard 2026, citing Aigli Zappeiou specifically. Esé Studio’s contribution to that room is what the listing is partly about.