The house through time
Built over generations and carefully restored, this house still carries the stories of the people who lived here.
The work
The restoration respected the architecture of the buildings and garden: irregular masonry without modern external pointing, walls of plastered reeds, old shutters and bars, cypress floors, the sunny drying veranda, the wine press, cistern and wood oven.
The oldest part of the estate is a two-room ground-floor kalivi, an example of 18th-century pastoral housing. People lived in one room and sheltered their animals in the other. Its stone feeding troughs and defensive opening remain.
The main house was raised over a great stone vault, a solution born from scarce timber and the need for naturally cool storage. The upper floor became the family home; the vault later served as a grocery and a wine-testing laboratory.
A new private room was added beside the sunny upper veranda for Sotiris Kamarinos, a philologist, headmaster and multilingual scholar whose books and journeys left a vivid imprint on the house.
The restoration kept the irregular stonework, cedar shutters, tsatma walls, cypress floor, old doors, stone troughs, cistern, wine press and wood oven. The aim was not to erase age, but to let the house continue speaking.
Local stone provides mass and insulation; cedar from Parnon forms floors, roof beams, shutters and doors that have endured for nearly two centuries. The vaulted ground floor is tied along its spine with vertical stone wedges and supported by adjacent structures.
The L-shaped house turns east and south, sheltering its veranda from the north wind. Thick walls, few northern openings and carefully placed windows soften summer heat while allowing winter sun into the rooms.
In this dry country, tiled channels gathered rainwater into a 25-cubic-metre cistern for cooking, washing, animals and plants. The same principle still supports the garden through the summer.
Dry-stone walls hold almond, fig and olive trees, herbs, an old vine arbor, vegetable beds, outdoor dining, a small stone theatre and the Byzantine-style wood oven. The planting follows the natural limits of Laconian land.
The restoration kept patches of old plaster, the reed-and-clay tsatma partitions and a partly burned doorway timber from the Second World War. In the former shepherd’s hut, stone feeding troughs still show how people and animals once shared the two-room building.
The Kamarinou family
For more than sixty years, the locked house kept the belongings—and the unanswered stories—of its last residents.
Opening the heavy wooden door as a child meant discovering early-20th-century glasses and hats, woven rugs, porcelain, lamps, coffee mills and, above all, leather-bound books: archaeology, pedagogy, classics and European travel guides carried home by Sotiris Kamarinos.
The family story also belongs to the village: Dimitra, remembered as “the good old lady”; Sotiris, whose German helped prevent wartime reprisals; and later generations who supported local widows, agriculture and water projects.
We are grateful to Dr Dimitra Kamarinou, who restored the house and shared its story with us. Her care for it is part of the welcome we offer today.
Come closer
Choose the room that feels like yours, check the indicative calendar and send us your preferred dates.
Request your stay