Stathis Mitropoulos has been working in graphic design and art direction from Athens since 2001. His practice covers editorial and publication design, brand identity, web design, packaging, and advertising — and the client list reads as a map of the city’s most serious cultural institutions: the Onassis Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, the Institut Français de Grèce, the Benaki Museum, the 2023 Elefsis European Capital of Culture, LIFO magazine. The work is not celebrated loudly. It is in the books, the programmes, the exhibition catalogues, the magazines that the city’s cultural life moves through.
“We don’t follow trends, and we don’t chase algorithms. We bring in books we believe in, and often we’re surprised by what people gravitate toward.”
In 2021, during the pandemic, Mitropoulos and Andreas Kokkinos — a former fashion and design editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine and an independent fashion stylist — looked at what Athens was missing and opened Hyper Hypo on Voreou 10 in Monastiraki. The name means above and below in Greek, a duality they embrace deliberately: high culture and subculture, seriousness and playfulness, the canonical and the radical on the same shelf.
The store carries photography, architecture, fashion, film, and graphic design titles — local and international, chosen without reference to algorithms or trend cycles. The walls are Yves Klein blue. The ground floor is books and magazines; the basement hosts regular exhibitions. Their own publishing imprint has produced Michael McGregor’s The Greece Notebook, Doors of Kypseli by Eleanor Lines, and Travelogue: Greek Everyday Solutions to Common Problems — all of which sold out. The street-facing window displays provocative covers and work that challenges norms. AnOther, The Aficionados, and Lampoon Magazine have all covered the shop. Monocle included it in its Athens guide.
Mitropoulos watches the city’s transformation with clear eyes and without sentimentality. The hardware shops have gone. The brunch places are arriving. His position is specific: the only defensible thing Athens has that no other European capital going through the same transition possesses is its Mediterranean character, and that is the thing worth holding onto.