Psirri has spent the last decade shedding its reputation as Athens’ industrial underbelly. Workshops and warehouses have given way to cocktail bars and independent galleries, and the neighbourhood’s layered palimpsest — Byzantine churches beside graffitied walls, metalworkers beside coffee roasters — has become one of the city’s most magnetic. It is here, at the end of a narrow, worn street, that MONA Athens quietly announces itself: a former 1950s textile factory transformed in 2022 by Eftihia Stefanidi and Shai Antebi of the Athens-based House of Shila.

The project is, by design, resistant to categorisation. Part hotel, part gallery, part residency, MONA occupies the building as a living organism rather than a fixed programme. Stefanidi and Antebi approached the restoration archaeologically — stripping, rather than adding — to expose seven decades of accumulated patina. The original iron staircase remains, as do the terrazzo floors, the Crittall windows and the marble façade; walls are largely left raw, their former coats of paint partially scraped to reveal chalky layers of Athenian blue and plaster pink. Into this sympathetic shell, House of Shila has introduced furniture, textiles and objects sourced from its own atelier, Shila Maison d’Objets, as well as from local artisans — velvets that invite touch, handwoven cottons, ceramics that pool the light.

The twenty rooms reject the uniformity of the contemporary boutique. Each is composed as a stand-alone still life, mixing custom joinery with vintage finds, and nearly every object — from the bedside lamps to the linens — carries a price tag for those who fall in love mid-stay. Bathrooms are pared back in character: poured cement, brushed brass, amber glass.

On the ground floor, a café-lounge doubles as a meeting place for Athens’ creative set, serving a tight, market-driven menu that shifts with the seasons; in the basement, a speakeasy-like venue hosts dinners, readings and listening parties, while the rooftop looks across tiled roofs towards the Acropolis on one side and Lycabettus on the other. Rotating exhibitions of photography, collage, painting and ceramics punctuate the public areas — some pieces commissioned, all for sale — establishing MONA as less a place one checks into than a place one stays inside, returns to and, more often than not, leaves with something from: a lamp, a textile, a way of seeing the city.