A restaurant on the first floor of a whitewashed villa on Paros, converted from a family dining room that had been closed for a decade.
The ceiling was the problem. It curves in two directions, follows no straight line, and had been patched so often that no flat treatment would sit on it. Meltemi Studio stopped trying to correct it and hung a garden from it instead.
Around forty hand-blown glass globes are suspended on copper wire at varying heights, each holding a cutting: ivy, string-of-pearls, ceppaea, a few small ferns. The wires cross and the plants trail, so the installation reads as a canopy rather than a row of pendants. It is watered every third day by a member of staff with a long-necked can, which the studio insisted on rather than a drip system, on the grounds that a restaurant should have someone tending its plants in front of guests.
Below the canopy, the furniture is deliberately mismatched. Cane-back chairs in the French provincial style were bought at auction from three separate island hotels and repainted in a single chalky off-white, so they share a colour but not a profile. The tables are weathered oak trestles, left unfinished and scrubbed. Candles in amber glass sit on every table and are lit from six in the evening, an hour before the sun goes down.
The walls carry a loose arrangement of black and white ornate mirrors, an oval convex mirror in green enamel, and a shallow niche of blue-and-white ceramic plates from the owner’s grandmother. Full-height doors at the end of the room open to the terrace and the sea. A ficus and a monstera stand in the corners, planted in the floor rather than in pots.
The jury liked the confidence of the ceiling installation and its maintenance logic, and noted that the room manages the difficult trick of appearing collected over time while having been assembled in eleven weeks. Its distance from the top award came down to acoustics: with hard plaster above and stone below, the room is loud when full, and the studio’s fabric measures came late.
Meltemi Studio works between Athens and Paros, founded in 2014 by Danae Kostopoulou. The practice is five people in winter and closer to twelve in the building season, and it takes on four or five hospitality projects a year, nearly all on the Cyclades. Its working method leans on salvage: the studio keeps a warehouse in Naoussa of furniture, doors and shutters bought from island properties as they are sold, and designs projects partly around what is in stock. Kostopoulou trained in set design, which shows in how her rooms handle light at dusk. She is joined by two long-standing collaborators, a lighting designer in Athens and a joiner on Paros, both credited on every project. The studio does not work on new-build hotels.