Athens firm Omniview’s flagship project is a bespoke success with rippling impact
Architect Dimitrios Tsigos is gesturing with excitement towards One Kleomenous. ‘This is all bespoke,’ he says. ‘You cannot imagine how challenging it was to bring all the contractors together and create something of this scale and technology in the middle of Athens.’ The structure’s undulating façade is certainly a departure from the tall blocks of flats that line the streets of Lycabettus Hill in Athens’ Kolonaki, as the curious stares it gets from passers-by and guests looking out of the upmarket hotel St George Lycabettus across the street demonstrate.
One Kleomenous is an important project for Tsigos. This single-family house is his first project of this scale since the financial crisis hit Greece so badly back in 2008 (‘It hit everybody – it also affected us,’ he says), making it a critical scheme in terms of working out his company’s next steps. It is the first and flagship project completed by his new venture, Omniview, set up with his brother John, also an architect, and property mogul Miltos Kambourides in 2013. One of Kambourides’ most recent schemes, luxury apartment block One Athens, in a landmark modernist office building by Constantinos Doxiadis, renovated by Divercity Architects, is just a stone’s throw away.
Having made his name with his experimental approach and fascination with advanced computer-aided architectural design, Athens-based Tsigos was happy to rise to the challenge. One Kleomenous mixes traditional materials, such as wood and marble, with ultra-modern construction methods. Omniview worked with several local craftsmen to realise Tsigos’ vision, using techniques most often seen in naval design and yacht interiors
INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Omniview website
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Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).
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