The Hotel is perched on an outcrop overlooking the ancient town of Pylos and the Bay of Navarino in the Peloponnese. There are 39 rooms within the main building of the hotel that also houses the reception, various lounge and terrace spaces, a pool, a spa, a restaurant and a bar. Scattered on the hillside beneath this building are an additional 12 rooms and 48 private villas each with their own garden and pool.
The architectural concept draws inspiration from the local agricultural tradition of the Mandria – dry stone animal shelters built by hand by the farmers working the land. These spontaneously constructed enclosures are built of stone found in the ground of the site and take a simple, straightforward form that follows the natural topography of the land, including or excluding any obstacles such as trees or large rocks that lie in their path. Naturally a hotel resort is a more complex building typology with more sophisticated requirements, but this land-led attitude to organic form-finding gave us our starting point.
The hotel design is a sequence of Mandria-inspired stone ribbon enclosures connected by cast concrete plates, clustered together according to the topography of the site, in a horizontal arrangement on the top of the hill. Cascading from this castle-like formation is the ‘village’ of private villas, all brought together by a densely aromatic and slightly wild landscape.
