Antiparos, an upscale antidote to overcrowded Greek islands

It’s a startling contrast after such a short journey, stepping off the five-minute ferry from Paros to the tiny island of Antiparos next door. Some elements are familiar, such as the whitewashed town near the harbour, a Cyclades cliché filled with those sugar-cube buildings.

But scan the scrubby, rocky landscape that comprises much of the rest of the island and there is something noticeably different about the place: it’s dotted with luxurious modern homes. In the sunshine there’s a glint of glass from one hilltop mansion; another huge home seems to be embedded in the rock as if hibernating; the curved walls of another have a mid-century modishness. 

“Barack Obama was here this summer,” the taxi driver tells me, proudly and unprompted, as we drive from the port. “Matthew McConaughey visited a while ago, too, and he was very nice.”

In the past 20 years, Antiparos has quietly emerged as one of the priciest places to buy a home anywhere in Greece: one estate here recently sold for €16mn, and more than 140 large new houses have been built here in the past two decades. 

Certainly, there’s star wattage here: Tom Hanks and his Greek-American wife Rita Wilson are longtime homeowners. But it would be wrong to think of the 35 sq km island as a mini Mykonos, says Ileana von Hirsch, whose company Five Star Greece handles seasonal rentals for many of the owners here as well as elsewhere in the country.

“Antiparos is the closest thing Greece has to Mustique,” she says, referring to the exclusive private island in the Caribbean. “One [client] had a beautiful house and specified the kind of [renters] he wanted: ‘Art Basel types,’ he said. No owner on Mykonos is going to say that to you.”

Adria Stamou runs a medical business with her family, and used to spend summers in Santorini nearby — now, thanks to cruise ships and Instagram, she barely uses their second home there. About 20 years ago some of her friends started snapping up plots in Antiparos and she followed their lead. She recently resolved to build on the 8 acres she owns and is working with architect Julie Spartinou Patroni on the final designs of a property that will include a main house and a guest cottage, which is primed for her 14-year-old son to use as a crash pad for his friends. She hopes to be using it by summer 2025.

We liked that the buildings here weren’t the very traditional-looking houses, which gives you the option for more creativity

Homes here are already fetching the same per square metre as luxury homes on Mykonos or Santorini, starting at around €7,000, according to Ifigeneia Diamantidou of Barnes International. Transaction data is not publicly available in Greece but the impact of rising interest rates has not had a major impact, agents report. “None of the sales we have made in the past year were financed — they were all cash,” says Yannis Ploumis, managing director of Ploumis-Sotiropoulos, an affiliate of Christie’s International Real estate.

Marina Manolopoulou, the Athens-based founder of Kultia Jewels, is another new-home builder. Hers is being designed by Babis Ioannou of architectural practice ISV. “We liked that the buildings here weren’t the very traditional-looking houses . . . which gives you the option for more creativity,” she says.

Both Manolopoulou and Stamou credit one man with driving interest in the island among wealthy would-be homeowners: Iasson Tsakonas. The 51-year-old property developer says he stumbled upon Antiparos 20 years ago after earmarking $3mn to buy an island summer home. “I was looking for sunsets, always dreaming of sunsets,” he says. So, he built a hilltop home on the island. “I’m quite a social person, so when I completed my house, I wanted to have fun with my friends. There were no grand plans,” he claims now, after finishing 55 projects in the past two decades under the banner of his company Oliaros (the ancient name for Antiparos).

New homes have been designed by the likes of Atelier Bow-Wow, AREA and Camilo Rebelo, a roster of architects that combines up-and-coming talents with established names.

“Buyers here like big houses, to have guests, or big pieces of land for privacy and to protect the island from development,” says Diamantidou — something that planning laws are almost perfectly suited to facilitate.

More than half of the island’s landmass is a protected preserve, and local lawmakers passed an edict in the 1990s intended to keep development at low density — unlike most other islands, where the minimum plot for development is 4,000 sq m, or around 1 acre, they doubled that requirement here. The proportion of their plots that developers can build on is smaller on Antiparos too.  

A recent change in Greek laws that intended to constrain development across the country is also having an impact on Antiparos, says Athens-based architect Martha Giannakopoulou. It requires new homes to sit on land that connects to a public road; and in Antiparos, there were few official tracks mapped out when the country started documenting them a century ago. “It means many plots [on the island] are in limbo right now, because they’re on undeclared streets,” she says. 

If you can get permission, though, it is often easier to create grand statement homes on largely rural islands such as Antiparos because, she says, unlike in settlements, there isn’t the same pressure to build in a way that is aesthetically consistent with your surroundings.

Many of the island’s wealthy homeowners are glad of the constraints: most that I talk to want to avoid the fate of a nearby island, one that they mention with shuddering unwillingness.

“What we all want to avoid is turning into Mykonos,” says Athanasia Comninos, a shipping heiress who owns and operates an upscale hotel, The Rooster. She arrived in the wake of a bad divorce and wanted a new island to use as her summer base. A wealthy friend had built two homes here; Comninos bought a swath of land on the west coast to turn into her resort.

Overdevelopment is still a pressing concern, however. “The Cyclades have a very fragile ecosystem,” says 50-year-old Constantinos Lambadarios, who’s been visiting here since he was a child and whose family first bought a house here in the 1980s. As the island’s population increases, he cites concerns around waste management and water — there’s no island-wide municipal supply, and digging wells is expensive, so many homeowners rely instead on deliveries by truck.

Antiparos locals all have this underlying sense of how special and powerful a place this is. People don’t want to see that change

There are hints the island is becoming a little more like Mykonos: take Soros beach club, for example, where one decorative element is an insouciant trash pile of empty Veuve Clicquot bottles and lunch is served to a clubby soundtrack. One new opening this summer was Bardot, a bar in the centre of the town operated by the same team as Alemagou nightclub on Mykonos.

These concerns didn’t deter Slater Bradley. The San Francisco-born artist first stumbled on the island where he would build a second home in the summer of 2016, after decamping from the US to live in Berlin a few years earlier. He was pinballing around the Greek islands and credits a “cosmic pull” for drawing him to the southern tip of Antiparos, where a patch of 700 or so plots had been laid out. “There were jaw-dropping views of the sea and the sunset,” he recalls. Within three days, he’d bought the land he was shown. He bought the plot next door a year later, too.  

Bradley is also working with the architect Julie Spartinou Patroni, though cost increases in the wake of the pandemic have delayed his construction. He hopes to create more than a home here, but rather a wellness centre, inspired in part by the energies he feels coursing through the island thanks to its quartz bedrock. Antiparos locals “all have this underlying sense of how special and powerful a place this is”, he adds. “People don’t want to see that change.”

On the market

Waterfront villa complex, €3.1mn

A brand new nine-bedroom, nine-bathroom home in the south of the island, overlooking Despotiko island. The property consists of three standalone homes, each with their own pool, to use independently or together. Available through Christie’s International Real Estate.

Contemporary hilltop home, €7.5mn

A six-bedroom house that looks like an idling spaceship sitting in the hills. It’s known as Lemonia, or the Lemon Tree, and was designed by Athens-based architects Deca. The circular home has more than 800 sq m of space. Available through Barnes International. (Also available to rent through Five Star Greece.)

Villa complex, €20mn

A collection of three stone-built villas in the south of the island, comprising a total of 12 en-suite bedrooms, three swimming pools and a tennis court. There is more than 1,600 sq m of living space built on a 16,000 sq m plot. Available through Barnes International.

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