Lepeniotou

A small room and a large garden in the sky, six floors above Psyri, with the Parthenon in front of it.

Sleeps 2 · 25 m² inside, 60 m² terrace · Sixth floor, lift · Four to fourteen nights

The proportions are the other way round from most apartments: twenty-five square metres indoors, sixty outdoors. The terrace is planted and shaded — jasmine over a pergola, lavender and palms in troughs, a long stone table for eight — and it sits high enough above the rooftops of Psyri that the Acropolis stands clear in front of it. At night the rock is lit and the table is the best seat in Athens.

Inside, one well-made room, low-lit and green-walled: a queen bed on a built platform, 160 by 200, with a goose-down duvet; a leather sofa, a kilim, a serious pair of speakers, and a screen that folds down from the ceiling when you want it. Underfloor heating for winter, quiet cooling for summer. The shower is glass on two sides and glass overhead, with a window onto a pomegranate tree, so you wash among leaves by day and under the sky at night.

It is a place to wake up early, carry coffee outside, and watch the light hit the marble before the city is up.

Psyri: workshops, tavernas, and the shortest walk to everything ancient.

Odos Lepeniotou is a narrow street in Psyri, the old artisans’ quarter between Monastiraki and the market. Leather workshops and hardware shops still work at street level; in the evening the same lanes fill with tavernas and small bars. Monastiraki square and its metro are three minutes away, the Ancient Agora five, and the Acropolis entrance a quarter of an hour on foot through Plaka.