It’s night in the Kolonaki district, and Mantzarou is a tree-lined segment connecting Skoufa to Solonos. You brush past the intimacies of neoclassical buildings, closed behind buttoned gates, within a deserted yet friendly urban landscape. It’s the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

Shila opens like a feminine and discreet shell. Low lights and muted colors in the name of an aesthetic creed that does not tolerate flaws and fulfills your desire for details. Your room is called “Dreamers,” and it greets you with music chosen for you, windows open to let in the nocturnes of Athens, and streaked scents. You walk barefoot through the spaces, glance out and take the high road, two friends saying goodbye at the corner, prepare a tea kept in a linen sachet. If there is too much sentiment in one corner, it is balanced by a dry form or a small, meaningful void just a little further on. Empathy for certain places is instantaneous. Travel memories, works of art, green velvets, and plump leaves of well-kept plants. Shila resembles your homes when they are at their best. The skeleton is that of a 1920s building: each room is a precious box with rounded corners, terrazzo floors, very high ceilings, and cracked walls. The next morning, the Greek sunlight will flood the room, and in that light, you will recognize the Aegean Sea with all its diaphanous breeze. Shila is one of those addresses devoid of weaknesses and imbued with that depth that invites you to stay.

In Athens lives a friend we have never met; this house is also a little bit hers.

Words Meraviglia Paper. Photographs Pia Riverola, cover by Adrianna Glaviano.