K-Studio is the Athens practice founded in 2002 by brothers Dimitris and Konstantinos Karampatakis. Their office is in the centre of the city, and most of their celebrated work has been on the Greek islands — Scorpios on Mykonos, the beach club that became a global reference point for slow-luxury Greek hospitality, is theirs, as are restaurant, villa, and resort projects across Mykonos, Tinos, Patmos, and beyond. The practice is known for restraint: local materials, handmade textures, spaces that let the landscape do the talking.
“The hotel’s interior plan is a compressed version of how central Athens is organised at street level.”
The Perianth Hotel, which opened in 2018 in central Athens, was K-Studio’s first significant hotel commission in the city itself — and a different kind of problem from anything the islands had presented. The building is a 1930s Streamline Modern structure near Monastiraki, trapezoidal in plan, originally built to house retail, offices, and apartments with no thought for its future life as a hotel. When K-Studio received the brief, the interior had already been stripped back to facade and structural elements only. The bones were all that remained, and the bones were irregular.
The practice turned that irregularity into a spatial concept drawn directly from Athens itself. The main circulation on each floor was designed as a wide ‘avenue’ mirroring the curve of the façade, from which narrower ‘alleys’ branch off — each leading to two or three rooms, creating acoustic separation and privacy within a tight urban footprint. Where the alleys meet the avenue, small ‘neighbourhood squares’ were carved out: communal spaces serving different purposes on each floor — dining room, lounge, wellness centre, work hub. The hotel’s interior plan is a compressed version of how central Athens is organised at street level.
The material palette was read off the building’s own surfaces. The characteristic grey of the pigmented rendered façade became the starting point: terrazzo flooring for cool lightness, American walnut for warmth, blush-pink velvet upholstery for the glamour the building’s period demanded. Custom-designed brass accents and bold furniture pieces completed the interior without decorating over it. Room sizes and ceiling heights change as you move up through the building — higher ceilings on the lower floors, larger floor areas and bigger balconies at the top — with each room carrying its own character from the oblique angles and leftover nooks of the original structure. Photography by Claus Brechenmacher & Reiner Baumann.
The Perianth won Best Suite at the Greek Hotel of the Year Awards 2020 — the most rigorous independent hospitality benchmark in Greece. For K-Studio, it remains the proof that the sensibility developed across years of island work — building with materials specific to a place, reading a site’s history before making any new mark on it — translates to the city as well as to the coast.