Twenty-five years of dust
Nicosia is the capital most travellers skip, the last divided city in Europe, and its walled old quarter is where Amyth has chosen to plant itself. The building goes back to the early 1900s, raised as two private residences on Patriarchou Grigoriou Street, opposite the Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios mansion, and later turned into a school before it was shut and left to the dust for the better part of twenty-five years. Thanos Hotels took it on and spent two years bringing it back, and what they kept matters as much as what they changed.
The wood-carved ceilings were restored rather than replaced, the painted floor at the entrance stayed down, and the old stone staircase still winds through the middle of the house. Eraclis Papachristou handled the architecture of the restoration, working inside a listed shell rather than over it. Pale blue shutters sit on honey-coloured stone, and the old city presses at every window.
Ten rooms, each its own
There are ten rooms and suites, each designed on its own terms, some with a veranda out over the rooftops of the old town. Maria Neophytou has given them a low-lit, unshowy calm, and the materials were picked to sit with what the house already had, the carved ceilings, the old shutters, the stone frame of the place. Nothing shouts. A courtyard of olive and citrus holds the centre and lets the light down into the middle of the building.
This is the first member of Design Hotels to open in Nicosia, which tells you something about the ambition and something about how thin the ground has been. It is a small house and it does not pretend to be a resort. The point is the building and the quiet, not a spa wing or a sea.
They kept the ceilings, the floor, the stair. The rest they made quietly modern.
Dinner in the courtyard
Dinner is served in the courtyard, under the trees, where the kitchen reads Cypriot first and broader Mediterranean after, built on local and seasonal produce and run by the chef Andrew Michael Smith. A smaller room across the lane takes the quieter nights, and there is a bar tucked away for a drink before you sit down. This is cooking tied to the island and the season rather than to any tasting-menu ambition, and it is the better for knowing what it is.
On a warm Nicosia evening the courtyard, lamplit and walled off from the street, is reason enough to book a table whether or not you are staying the night.
Most of what passes for a city hotel in this part of the Mediterranean is a tower with a view. Amyth is the opposite, a listed house given its life back inside the walls, and it makes the case that Nicosia is worth a night of its own rather than a change of planes on the way to the coast. Come for the building and the quiet, take a room with a veranda over the rooftops, and let the old town do the rest.
Photos: Amyth of Nicosia (official), with credit.
