THE GREEK DESIGNER Leda Athanasopoulou — whose practice spans jewelry, furniture and interiors — has spent her life in Athens, London, New York and Paris. But when the 34-year-old thinks of home, her mind immediately goes to Patmos, the rocky, secluded Dodecanese island near the coast of Turkey where her mother, Katerina Tsigarida, an esteemed Greek architect, and father, Dimitris, a businessman, started buying property in the early 1990s, when their three children were young. As a girl, Athanasopoulou spent every summer in Chora, the island’s preserved, whitewashed village, baked into a hill and crowned by an 11th-century Christian monastery, roaming between her family’s house and those of her friends. In the middle of Chora, where cars are forbidden (not that they’d fit through the winding stone paths anyway), she would pass the bakery, its ringed sesame koulouri still made fresh every morning, and, across the street, an imposing mansion with a blocky front staircase and just a few windows across its fortresslike facade. “I didn’t notice the house, to be honest,” says Athanasopoulou on a hot September afternoon. “There are so many beautiful houses here, and you often have no idea who lives in them.”
But now she’s the one who lives there, having purchased the 5,400-square-foot, two-story property — which also has a 440-square-foot terrace on its top floor, connecting three of its five bedrooms — five years ago. When she first considered buying it, Athanasopoulou realized that one reason she hadn’t been familiar with the building was that it had been uninhabited since the 1980s. Its last restoration was likely in the early 20th century, when the residents incorporated various neo-Classical elements: intricately patterned cement tiles in a few common spaces; exterior shutters on newly enlarged windows; a faux-marble fresco on the foyer and staircase walls. In UNESCO-protected Chora, though, architectural preservation has for centuries been taken seriously — no matter how much money locals or expat arrivistes might have, they’re not permitted to move walls, tear through floors or enlarge and combine all the rooms. And so the house, which Athanasopoulou named Sekiari, still reflected the taste of its first owner, Zannis Sinetos Sekiaris, a Greek trader who conjoined three separate structures in 1799, then added details that are endemic to the island, like beige Patmian stone window frames and stamped terra-cotta floor tiles.
What Athanasopoulou could do was rearrange and redecorate the place from top to bottom, creating a more modern refuge that she felt dignified the island’s traditions. This is the fifth project that she’s finished on Patmos since she overhauled one of her family’s houses when she was 19, including a monastic three-bedroom hotel called Pagostas. Though she also works in Athens, where she has a home, and on a few other Aegean Islands, it’s in Chora in particular that she’s forged connections with makers and contractors, who have influenced her minimalist style, with its signature palette of pale greens and blues, rustic loomed textiles (usually dead stock) and vernacular craft techniques. Today, she says, “things are changing because many people are coming to the island, and everyone’s a bit overwhelmed. But I have close relationships, and I know how the locals work. It’s easy for me to communicate, so it’s more personal.”
WITH THE SEKIARI project, however, she felt she could truly experiment — for the first time on Patmos, she was her own boss. “I pushed custom items to the front, where a client might’ve been more reluctant,” she says. As the house winds upward, via mazelike hallways that pass through former pantries, closets and other small rooms, there are bespoke Greek elements everywhere you look: reclaimed marble-topped consoles in both the first- and second-floor kitchens; twin- and king-size beds made by soldering antique metal ones together; 1960s Greek Keramikos pottery transformed with wiring into table lamps; and lots of reclaimed wood pieces, like juniper sofas with tufted upholstery and a long chestnut table in the ground-floor dining room. When she moved in, the designer discovered that the previous generations had also left behind items that she eventually chose to incorporate, such as Ottoman-era trays and trunks from when Patmos was under the rule of the Turks, and 19th-century mirrors and French gravures that speak to its more recent European history.
Yet one of Athanasopoulou’s most prized possessions claims the middle of the large 20-by-15-foot living room just past the entryway. There, beneath a late 19th-century English walnut table, she laid a cerulean-and-sage Pronoia rug, its floral medallion pattern inspired by Byzantine and Greek folk art, although it was made in one of the country’s rural regions around 1960, when the former monarchy promoted weaving as a form of social welfare. Athanasopoulou loves the carpet right where it is, framed by the built-in banquettes that claim two corners. But for the past two summers, whenever she’s returned here, she’s completely rearranged the room’s lighting, art and objects. “It’s a work in progress,” she says. “It’s not like I spent a month on it and now the living room is finished. Every time I go, I’ll improve something — that’s the way I live.” After all, Patmos is much different from when she was a child. So is the house that she barely noticed back then. The only thing she can do is keep changing, too.
