Founded by the Egyptian businessman Karim El Chiaty (of Travco fame), Anandes announces itself not with a fanfare but a whisper: a whitewashed punctuation mark tucked into a hillside of Chora, close enough to Mykonos Town that you can wander down in sandals and a sulk, far enough that the island’s nightly drum-and-bass of ice buckets and dirty intentions becomes a distant metronome. The building isn’t new – there’s honest history in the bones – and you feel it in the dimensions: rooms that have been coaxed and curated rather than bulldozed into bigness. Space here is a precious resource, like shade at noon or virtue at 3 a.m.
Design has been done with the sort of quiet, educated taste that takes money, restraint and an experienced designer. No ship’s rope knotted into chandeliers, no drums of reclaimed nonsense. Instead, there’s natural stone underfoot that remembers the day it was quarried. Athens-based Studio Bonarchi was the name behind the common areas as well as the 42 rooms and suites (many of which feature private pools). They have merged traditional elements with contemporary minimalism, deploying pine wood, linen and rattan against a neutral colour palette that make your retina unknit, with lighting that flatters the skin so thoroughly it should be on the payroll. It’s modern but not modish, a Cycladic haiku rather than a Kardashian sonnet.
“Mykonos has always held a special place in our hearts, having frequented the island for over 30 years, so we are thrilled to be bringing this special oasis to the island,” explains Chiaty. “Anandes is a love letter to vintage Mykonos – an homage to the timeless Greek elegance and charm of Mykonos that made the island famous to begin with.”
Our Junior Suite with a Sea View was compact in the way a glove is compact – close, purposeful, and surprisingly accommodating once you work out what finger goes where. Cupboards are not for the indecisive; the suitcase diet is implied. Yet, slide the door to the terrace and the island inflates to cathedral proportions. There sits a hot tub, permanently purring at a civilised simmer, as if someone had taught it manners. It overlooks the town’s white sugar-cube tangle and the sea beyond, the view changing its mood with the sun like a beautiful person considering their angles. We got disgracefully attached to that tub. Morning, evening, between courses – it was always ready, a perpetual invitation to be a better version of yourself, or at least a wetter one. (Indeed, our surprising attachment to it even answered an initial question we had as to why there were always so few people in the hotel pool – Anandes is a place for getting away from it all, and everyone, remember.)
Service is the hotel’s quiet show-off. It is neither obsequious nor performative; it simply appears, at the precise moment when you think, “It would be nice if –” and then it is. Towels multiply like rabbits. Ice is a reflex. Directions come without the finger-wagging of the sat-nav nanny. There’s an unflappable, clear-eyed warmth to the staff that feels more like competence than choreography – a rare luxury indeed.
The amenities at Anandes are scaled to reality rather than brochure fantasy. The spa is tiny – hand-luggage tiny – but it’s clean, calm and better at soothing with just two treatment rooms, a hammam and a sauna, than most places with eight, an ice room, and a gong. The mini gym lives up to its billing: it’s a good-faith attempt with enough Technogym machinery to appease one’s guilt before breakfast, which, as it happens, is very much worth attending.
That's because the restaurant is LPM – as in La Petite Maison – and it does what you expect of it: Riviera sunlight squeezed into food. It caters to hotel guests during the day, offering a bespoke menu that nods to France and Greek cuisines, and is open to the public for dinner, with dishes designed for sharing, including all the usual hits like warm prawns in olive oil, snails with garlic butter, and octopus. Naturally, there’s an extensive wine and cocktail list too.
At this LPM, breakfast ambles into lunch and then sashays into dinner with a kind of effortless, lemon-bright continuity. Plates arrive with that persuasive simplicity that suggests the kitchen has the confidence to get out of the way: good olive oil doing God’s work, vegetables tasting of the month they were born, fish that still remembers the sea with affection. It’s cosmopolitan without being smug, and it’s extraordinarily convenient to have a destination table downstairs when the meltemi has combed your will to travel flat. Then again, if ever your hangover is so bad that even your shadow is asking you to whisper then you can just order your LPM to your room – a first for the brand.
Honestly speaking, if you’re looking for a tasteful, design-led boutique hotel to enjoy (or even escape) the decadence of Mykonos then this is the place for you, particularly if you appreciate fair value. The Anandes is a clever, careful reimagining of a property with legacy footprints – so what if some rooms are Frankly Not Large. This is Greece, not the American Midwest. If you require a walk-in wardrobe to do your existential pacing, look elsewhere. Space at Anandes is deployed like a good joke: precisely, sparingly, and to maximum effect. You notice it most in the bathrooms, that station their basins in the bedroom – a potential problem for night-time tinklers who want to wash their hands but also prefer not wake up their partners. Yet the hotel compensates with grace notes – the terrace, the view, the always-on hot tub, the Bang & Olufsen technology, the bathroom amenities by Frederic Malle and quite possibly the most comfortable bed and high-thread-count linens you’ll feel this side of an Aman.
Its location is also a gift. Being walking distance to town means spontaneous dinners that don’t require negotiation with a concierge, and the great joy of slipping back up the hill later, the sound of other people’s fun softening into bedtime punctuation. The setting also gives you the daily pleasure of the approach: that wander along lanes where cats are chancellors and bougainvillea makes a case for fuchsia as a primary colour.
Once you weigh it all up, the Anandes makes an incredibly compelling case. Especially on an island where the price of a sunbed can cause religious doubt, this hotel isn't just well priced (the cheapest of the eight categories of rooms starts at just over 900 USD a night), it’s a bargain, especially given the calibre of the design, the standard of the service, and the LPM magnet downstairs. You leave with your sense of proportion intact, and that is increasingly rare in these parts.
Opposite: This is not a hotel for people who measure holidays in square metres. It’s for those who take their pleasures concentrated: a view that hushes you, breakfast that turns into a plan for the day, and staff who understand that hospitality is an action, not a posture. Anandes is a boutique in the old sense: edited, curated, and worn close to the skin. Above, top left and right: The first and only LPM in Greece occupies an open-air space around the Anandes pool with 125 covers. Above, bottom left: Twenty-six of the 42 bedrooms have a private pool or Jacuzzi.