Mandarin Oriental’s newest Greek addresses are not hotels. On October 26 the group added four privately owned villas to its Exceptional Homes collection: Casa Gaia in Mykonos, VAYRA and Villa Alice in Corfu, and SERENAOS in Lefkada. Weekly rates run from €17,059, about $19,800, for the smallest house to €69,062, about $80,100, for the largest.
Exceptional Homes rents private houses with a hotel’s staff attached: a dedicated concierge, a private chef service and daily housekeeping, in homes the group selects but does not own. The Greek additions put the model on two seas at once, the Cyclades in the Aegean and the Ionian islands in the west. The per-guest arithmetic is friendlier than the headline rates suggest. Villa Alice sleeps eight, which works out to about €2,132 a person for the week, chef and concierge included.
The four houses
Casa Gaia sits above Fokos Beach on Mykonos’s northern coast, the quiet side of an island not known for quiet. Greek architect Loukas Bobotis designed the nine-bedroom house, which sleeps 18 and has a 27-metre infinity pool, a second pool, a private cinema and a fire pit, with a path running down to a secluded stretch of shoreline. At €69,062 a week it is priced for the full house: the reunion, the wedding party, the trip that needs its own cinema.
SERENAOS, in a private olive grove at Ellomeno on Lefkada’s southeastern coast, is the water house. Designed by Spiros Scafidas, the five-bedroom villa sleeps ten and comes with an infinity pool, a private bay, a floating pontoon and a fleet of boats included in the €49,700 weekly rate. From the terraces, the view takes in Meganisi, Thilia and Scorpios, the island the Onassis family made famous. In Corfu, VAYRA is carved into an 8,000-square-metre hillside at Kentroma, its walls and paths built partly from the red rock dug out of the site during construction. Landscape architect Eleni Tsirintani kept the centuries-old olive trees standing. Five suites split between a main house and a guest house sleep ten, with two infinity pools, a roof terrace, a padel court and pétanque, from €24,360 a week.
Villa Alice, at Gimari on Corfu’s northeastern coast, is the entry point: four bedrooms, eight guests, and terraces that open straight onto an infinity pool over the Ionian Sea, at €17,059 a week.
What the rate buys
Every house in the collection is privately owned and chosen for its setting and design. The group’s part is the service layer, and the name that vouches for it. “Greece is a natural focus for the continued growth of Mandarin Oriental Exceptional Homes,” said Philip Leighton, who runs the collection. “These four additions allow us to offer a richer and more diverse expression of the country, spanning the Cyclades and the Ionian islands.” The group already runs a resort in Greece, Mandarin Oriental, Costa Navarino, on the southwestern Peloponnese. The wider homes collection reaches Mallorca, Ibiza, Marbella, the French Riviera, Tuscany, Bali and Los Angeles.
At SERENAOS, the boats come with the house. In the Ionian, that is the whole argument.
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