The Danai: Where Greece's Most Loyal Guests Go Back Every Summer
· By April Windsor
In: Hotels
The Danai is a hotel people go back to. It sits on a pine-covered cliff above the Aegean on Sithonia, the middle finger of Halkidiki, with a private beach at the bottom of the garden, a wine cellar the hotel calls the largest in Greece, and fifty-six rooms, no two the same. People have been coming back to it every summer for half a century. In 1975 the cheapest land in Halkidiki was the land beside the sea, priced by its olive trees, and the salt soil along the shore grew poor ones, so nobody wanted it. Danai Riefenstahl and her husband Otto Riefenstahl, from Berlin, bought a green slope between the villages of Nikiti and Metamorfosi, and the following summer opened House Danai with four rooms, beds built from brick, and supplies that came up from the village by horse and cart. This year is its fiftieth season.
Georgia, the chambermaid who cleaned those first four rooms on opening day, worked here until she retired; it was the only job she ever had. The son and two daughters who grew up on the property still work in it, with Kimon Riefenstahl as owner and managing director, and the family, by its own account, still walks the suites and changes what it thinks needs changing. It is a member of The Leading Hotels of the World and, as far as we can tell, has never been owned by anyone but the Riefenstahls.
FIFTY YEARS ON A CLIFF
The Danai has not lasted fifty years by leaving anything alone. Danai Riefenstahl got interested in architecture and craftsmanship early on and, the hotel says, never stopped, so the place has grown the way a village does: marble residences stepping down through two-hundred-year-old pines, a chapel, a library, a tennis court and a lane of shops nicknamed Danai 5th Avenue. The fiftieth has been marked with builders rather than a party. Since 2023 the family has redone its two best restaurants, built a wine house and a spa, and now remade its pool, its beach and its best rooms, bringing in a London studio for the anniversary.
WHAT IS NEW FOR THE FIFTIETH
Muza Lab, the Notting Hill studio of Inge Moore and Nathan Hutchins, whose work includes One&Only Aesthesis in Athens, was given the Pool Suites, the main pool and the beach. “The Danai has absorbed the character of the landscape and the stories of its people over decades,” the studio said when the season opened. “The new designs preserve the soul of the house while giving it a modern interpretation.”
The Pool Suites
These are the rooms to book. They are on the ground floor, sixty square metres for the one-bedroom and a hundred and eight for the two-bedroom family version. Each has a private garden, its own heated pool and a wall of glass that slides back onto the vines, with the Aegean beyond. Inside, Muza Lab used the colours of the garden: greens, blues and teal against pale timber, with carved wood, floral motifs and mother-of-pearl. The studio worked with local craftsmen. “We wanted the Pool Suites to reflect the natural beauty surrounding the accommodations, combining stone, hand-crafted wood details, and a modern, organic aesthetic,” Kimon Riefenstahl said when they were unveiled in February.
The Pool and the Beach
A new main pool sits at the centre of the resort, tiled in bold patterns by the studio, which also redid the beach. The private beach runs three hundred metres and was redone for this season, lined with rope-work cabanas, each with a sofa, a double bed and its own stretch of sand. At the far end the Royal Beach Cabana adds a swinging bed, a place to lunch, a desk and a shower, which is as near to a beach house as a hotel gets. Kayaks and canoes are free; you pay for the Sea Bobs and the water skiing.
The Shops
Two new shops opened on the lane this year. The Boutique stocks Greek designers, among them Alexandra Tsoukala's sculptural pleated pieces, Kourelou's handmade bags, Malami's hand-painted silk and the young label Amphora, alongside resort wear; the hotel says the handbags are what people leave with. The new jewellery shop sells work by Greek goldsmiths. Both are small and both stock Greek makers, which few hotel shops do.
On the Water
The news for families is the Elisabeth & Friends Sailing School, which took its first children out this summer, an extension of the kids' club and crèche that takes them from four months. For couples there is Birdie, a forty-eight-foot Princess with a single cabin and a flybridge that arrived in spring and runs to the Blue Lagoon of Diaporos and along the shore of Mount Athos. The Bird, an eighty-two-foot Sanlorenzo with four cabins and a private chef, does the longer trips, three days or more through the Sporades.
THE REST OF THE HOUSE
The suites run from thirty-five square metre Deluxe Junior Suites to the Seafront Penthouse at a hundred and ninety, and above them sit four villas, the largest the White Villa: four bedrooms, around nine hundred and fifty square metres, a two-level marble terrace on the cliff edge, an infinity pool and a summer jacuzzi. Pool suites and villas all get Acqua di Parma in the bathroom, a Bose system, a Nespresso machine, and a fence around the pool if you arrive with a toddler and ask for one.
The spa came two seasons before the rest, opening for 2024 at nine hundred square metres, with a classic sauna, a salt sauna with infrared, a hammam, what the spa calls experience showers, an indoor pool and a Technogym floor with on-screen training. The treatments are mostly Ayurvedic, Thai and shiatsu, in rooms for one or two. Ask and they will find you a personal trainer, a yoga or Pilates instructor or a tennis coach.
THE TABLE
Breakfast is under the pines until eleven, a buffet built around what The Bakery House baked that morning, plus whatever you order cooked. On Sundays it turns into brunch, runs until twelve and comes with live classical music. Stay for it. The Bakery House, opened in 2023, is the reason there is home-made chocolate in the minibar, and it runs baking classes for children and adults. The Philosophy Bar opens at nine on the seafront and stays open late.
Lunch is The Anithos, the Greek restaurant on the beach: fish, seafood and the barbecue, and a long children's menu. It opens for dinner too. The Andromeda is the Mediterranean fine-dining room on a marble terrace under the trees, redone in 2023, with à la carte and a five-course menu that changes daily and two stars from Greece's FNL restaurant awards. Then there is The Squirrel.
The Squirrel
Five tables, a floor of red marble, original art on the walls, wrought-iron chairs with backs shaped like leaves, and a white balustrade with the Aegean behind it and the sun going down into it. Named for the small black squirrels in the pines overhead, it has held three FNL stars for ten consecutive years. Those awards run to four stars, and the hotel calls them the Michelin equivalent for a part of Greece the guide has not reached. Vasilis Mouratidis cooks a set menu of several courses, Irish langoustines and Ossetra caviar among them, with a pescatarian route through it. It is closed on Mondays, does not take children, and with five tables it fills fast, so reserve it when you book the room.
THE NOBLE HOUSE
In 2023 the family opened The Noble House, fifteen hundred square metres of sandstone built into the hillside like a monastery, with a hundred and thirty metre vaulted tunnel of wine run as a museum, a cheese room, a tasting room and a terrace over the vines to the sea. It holds seventeen hundred labels and more than eighteen thousand bottles, which the hotel calls the largest private wine collection in Greece, and among the collectables is a Heidsieck Monopole from 1907.
When you vinify the first bottle, you don't yet know exactly what the land demands of you.
Apostolos Plahouras has been head sommelier since 2010, runs a team that has won the country's best wine programme and best sommelier awards, and is, the hotel says, studying for the Master of Wine. This year the estate made its first wine. Noble Story is a red from three heat-resistant varieties, Grenache, Mourvèdre and a Syrah variant, planted on the hotel's own slope, and it was opened to mark the start of the fiftieth season. “The first bottlings reveal what the soil requires to give its very best,” he said of it. Take the tour and taste it where it grew.
The Verdict
Fifty years is a long time for one family to run a hotel, and most that manage it have stopped changing by now. The Danai has spent its anniversary rebuilding the pool, the beach, its best rooms and its shops, and opening a bottle of wine it grew. It still feels like the family's house. Book a Pool Suite, eat at the Squirrel on your first night rather than your last, and take Birdie out to Diaporos.
GETTING THERE & WHEN TO GO
Thessaloniki airport is under an hour's drive, with direct flights from across Europe through the summer, and the hotel arranges transfers. The Danai is seasonal, opening in spring and closing in October, so confirm the dates when you book. June and September are the months to aim for, when the sea is warm and it is quieter than in August.