Hotel Aspro sits on a bare hillside at the southern end of a small Cycladic island, and at first glance you might mistake it for a cluster of farm buildings. Its eleven rooms occupy low, whitewashed volumes with thick walls, deep-set windows and flat roofs, arranged around a courtyard shaded by a single ancient olive tree. There is no spa, no restaurant menu, no beach club and, most conspicuously, no infinity pool. Guests swim instead in a small cove below, reached by a path through wild thyme.
Aspro is one of a growing number of island hotels that define themselves by what they refuse. Across the Aegean, the Balearics, the Azores and the Canaries, a generation of architects and hoteliers has turned against the conventions of the luxury resort: the gleaming pool cantilevered over the sea, the imported materials, the landscaping irrigated at enormous cost on islands chronically short of water. In their place, they offer something older and harder to photograph: buildings that seem to belong to the place.
The architect behind Aspro, Dafni Leventaki-Rowe, grew up on a neighbouring island and spent years watching resort development transform its coastline. Her approach begins with local building traditions, which evolved over centuries to cope with sun, wind and scarcity. Thick masonry walls keep rooms cool without air conditioning for most of the year. Small windows frame specific views rather than offering panoramic glazing. Rainwater is collected in cisterns beneath the courtyard, as it was on the island for generations.
The luxury of restraint
The infinity pool has become, for Leventaki-Rowe and her peers, a symbol of everything wrong with contemporary resort architecture. On islands where fresh water is precious and summer droughts are intensifying, a pool that loses thousands of litres to evaporation each day is an act of extraordinary carelessness. It is also, she argues, an aesthetic failure: a device designed to erase the boundary between building and landscape that ends up replacing the landscape with an image of itself.
Why would anyone build a fake sea in front of a real one?
The same thinking extends to interiors. At Aspro, furniture was made by carpenters on the island, from olive and cypress wood. Bedspreads were woven by a cooperative of women in a nearby village; ceramics came from a potter in the main town. Food is simple and local, prepared by a cook who shops each morning at the harbour. Guests eat together at a long table in the courtyard, or take baskets down to the cove. There is no room service, and nobody seems to miss it.
Similar principles guide Casa Basalto, a nine-room hotel on an Azorean island built into the ruins of a nineteenth-century wine estate, where volcanic stone walls were restored by local masons rather than replaced. On Menorca, Finca Salina has converted a series of old salt warehouses into rooms with floors of reclaimed clay tiles. In each case, the hotel's identity comes from its place, and its luxury lies in quiet, space and time rather than in facilities.
These hotels are not cheap, and they are not for everyone. Guests expecting constant service and a menu of amenities may find them austere. But for a growing number of travellers, their restraint is precisely the attraction. On my last evening at Aspro, I sat on the courtyard wall as the sun dropped behind the next island. The whitewash turned pink, then grey. Somewhere below, goats were moving across the hillside, their bells faint in the wind. It was the most luxurious hour of my year.
