Designer John Stefanidis has created a home with a mythic quality on the Greek island of Patmos
Patmos, the smallest of the twelve islands known as the Dodecanese, lies north of Crete, a geological crumb broken from the coast of southern Turkey. For millennia its history has been a palimpsest of those who have invaded or arrived seeking sanctuary. In Greek mythology it is said to be the place where Orestes took refuge in his flight from the Furies after the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. It is where the exiled John the Apostle converted the population to Christianity, before retiring to a cave to write the Apocalypse. It has been ruled by the Byzantines, the Venetians and the Turks. In the 1960s a new influx began, which continues to this day; the arrival of the European and American beau monde.
To many people I meet on the island, the designer John Stefanidis and the house he created there with his former partner, the artist Teddy Millington Drake, was the start of this. Indeed they have taken on an almost mythic quality. ‘Everyone wants their house to look like John’s,’ says my host. Indeed it is rare to come across an interior that feels as if it sits so firmly outside of time and trends.
The story begins in the summer of 1963. The world was undergoing its great postwar loosening. Modernism was taking hold, old social structures were crumbling, and from the combustible mingling of artists, intellectuals and aristocrats, a new kind of Bohemianism was starting to take root. John Stefanidis, then a young advertising executive raised between Egypt and Eritrea but living in Milan, landed on the island with Teddy Millington Drake. Teddy was from an eccentric aristocratic family, and was then living at Villa Albrizzi at Este in the Veneto, the pair socialising with a set that included Barbara Hutton, Elsa Maxwell and Peggy Guggenheim.
The men had become friends in Milan, which was in the midst of its great ‘boom’, though John had first become aware of Teddy while at Oxford. ‘I’d seen in Sketch magazine a full-page photograph taken by Tony Armstrong-Jones of a man named Teddy Millington-Drake, sitting in a boat in Venice with a sketchbook in his lap. I was immediately drawn to the image. I asked a friend who had been at Magdalen College with Teddy whether he was “nice.” The answer was, “I wouldn’t say nice.”’
They arrived ‘in an old boat laden with animals,’ at the end of a tour of the eastern Mediterranean. Landing at noon, ‘a haunted hour,’ they climbed the steep road from the harbour on foot. Crowning the island, its dark grey crenellated walls as imposing as the helmet of a knight, is the 11th-century monastery of Saint-John the Theologian, under which the houses of the mediaeval town of Chora are scattered over the hillside like sugar cubes. When they arrived, the town was almost abandoned, many of the properties derelict behind crumbling walls. By the end of that first summer they had bought a 16th-century farmhouse for £1000. On three levels, the property descended through terraced gardens to fields enclosed by neglected stone walls. The monastery towered behind, and in front was the, ‘old Testament view across the dry fields to the eighteenth-century hermitage of the Prophet Elijah.’
‘Everywhere is the sea – steel blue, azure, turquoise, deepest sapphire, depending on the direction of the wind,’ writes John in his book An Island Sanctuary. ‘Goats graze on the hillsides, and in the evening the stillness is broken by the sound of their bells. The spiritual world of Byzantium is all around you. Church bells ring and the hum of early Christian chants, part of the Orthodox liturgy, float across the fields, even as the ancient gods, always present in Greece, hover above you – Elijah’s chapel is, after all, built on the site of a temple to Apollo. In the olive groves at the foot of the garden, Julian the Apostate still murmurs admonishments to return to the old ways.’
The house, abandoned for 25 years, had ‘sound, thick walls, old carved doors, and bleached wood floors. There were oil lamps for light, and rainwater was collected in cisterns.’ John returned to Patmos that winter, persuading a plumber and an electrician to travel from the Greek mainland with him. With the help of a local builder and carpenter he began to restore the house.
‘I was careful to leave as much as was possible of the old existing vernacular architecture intact. Untrained but curious and observant, I found that my years in Italy had sharpened and refined my aesthetic. New furniture was made on the island to complement traditional antiques, introducing traditional Ottoman themes that had once been indigenous to the Dodecanese. The restoration of the house in Patmos and the fortuitous results gave me confidence. I decided to pursue a career in design.’
John eventually rebuilt and modernised ten houses on the island. Always working with local builders, he developed a style that was delicately reverential to the past but shot through with elements of striking modernity. He insisted that the fundamental character of the houses was preserved, that whitewashed walls retained their bumps, and woodwork was restored rather than replaced. He helped revive the Patmonian tile industry by using designs made on the island. In the rooms, old kilims from Anatolia lie contentedly alongside bright dhurries newly commissioned from India. An ornate brass and wood chest found in the Hadhramaut sits beneath a large 18th-century Italian mirror. An inlaid ivory Moghul desk is mixed with rare Turkish embroideries and Indian miniatures.
‘What might be called Mediterranean style,’ he says, ‘is in many ways a conceit, given the numerous layers of civilisations, cultures, and influences that contribute to it; conceit that is composed of romanticism, sensuality, and practicality. It is a triumph of common sense. Whitewashed walls reflect light and heat; thick walls render rooms cool; cotton furnishings are fresher to the touch and the eye than wool and velvet. The most valuable gift of the Mediterranean to domestic life is the seamlessness between inside and outside: there is no psychic separation between the two.’
Teddy's work is still everywhere in evidence. From an anteroom painted with images of the sun and the moon, to a triptych of abstract works depicting the words Psyche, Eros and Zeus. ‘They demonstrate his superb draughtsmanship,’ says John. ‘The control and flow of line admired by the artist Cy Twombly who came to Patmos in the early 1960s with Nicola Del Roscio.’ In the 1980s they bought an adjoining house, where Teddy made a studio to paint. A stream of guests would arrive every summer. ‘We watched the island begin to change, in part the result of our presence. There had always been cruise ships, but people soon began to come on yachts.’
John and Teddy never lived together, ‘except on our travels or in Patmos. The house was our shared creation. We lived in our separate bedrooms, just the two of us, for a decade or more, our many guests sharing a guesthouse at a convenient distance.’
Later, the men would be estranged for eight years. ‘I was in a San Francisco hotel when Teddy’s nephew, who found antiques for my projects, came to my room to say that Teddy was in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London and very much wanted to see me. Teddy said he did not want to take disagreements to the grave. As I tidied his hospital room, he said it was nice to have the boss back – cheeky! I had missed his droll and quirky mind. For the next three months, we were close again.’
Teddy Millington Drake made a final journey to Patmos before he died of AIDS in September 1994. In the garden of the house John built a whitewashed mausoleum, inscribed with XAIRE (hail and goodbye in ancient Greek).
In the almost 20 years since Teddy’s death, John has continued to embellish and nourish the house and its garden. Cypress, citrus and pomegranate trees, rosemary, verbena, oregano, basil, and bay flourish. ‘There is the sound of birdsong, the fluttering of dove wings and swallows nesting. Doors and windows left ajar with the scent of jasmine, lemon, and orange blossom wafting from the terraces that descend steeply to the garden rooms.’
John believes that a house lived in for decades by the same person, ‘emanates an atmosphere of old loves, lost friends, past thoughts, agreements and disagreements, happiness and misery.’ For him, sophistication and style are not analogous to happiness, ‘which springs rather from comfort, good manners, colours that please the eye, works of art, flowers, and cherished objects. A vista from room to room. These are gifts that enhance the world you have created.’
‘There comes a time in life when you assess the friendships that have given you the most pleasure, amusement, and affection. The same can be said of a place or a house. In my lifetime, it is a house and a garden on the island of Patmos, Greece, that have nurtured the soul.’
John Stefanidis: A Designer's Eye (Rizzoli) is available to buy now
Davide Lovatti1/31A traditional island sofa with mattress style cushions in a JS fabric. The plate on the wall is 17th century Italian majolica. The low table is Indian, inset with mother-of-pearl. The blue and red table is a JS design used elsewhere in the house in different colours. On it are displayed various pieces of silver including an Egyptian coffee pot.
2/31This room has a sense of repose and purity. A stark room, it nevertheless has the There is a glint of brass from low Indian tables, but other than The mattress cushions and scatter cushions on the Empire-style sofas are all white, as are the covers of the ultra-comfortable chaise longues from the 1970.
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Davide Lovatti4/31Looking through to the raised platform of the Turkish Sofra Room on the left and a guest bedroom on the right. The doors and windows dividing these rooms are glazed in blue glass. The high window has green, red, and blue made on the island. All other cushions, including the mattress cushions, are in red and white striped cotton.
Davide Lovatti5/31In a guest bedroom off the white room that has an iron four-poster bed hung with hand-emboidered curtain from northern Greece, with pink grosgrain ribbons.
Davide Lovatti6/31Whitewashed stone steps outside the kitchen window lead from the entrance courtyard to the upper terrace. On the left John planted a vine in the 1960s that functions as a banister.
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Davide Lovatti8/31This room with its whitewashed arch has a long, built-in stone seat with cushions and a locally made trestle table and wooden bench. The mammoth beams with twigs and bamboo wedged between are blackened with age. Some of the terra-cotta floor tiles have been broken by the hooves of donkeys from the time when animals were housed on the ground floor. It is from this room that there may have been a passage leading to the church of St. Mary the Saviour.
Davide Lovatti9/31The cushions are a mixture of a JS-printed design, Patmiote and Anatolian needlework — some embroidered and others woven on a kilim loom.
Davide Lovatti10/31On the rack are collections of plates, some from the island of Skyros, others a set of plates depicting the seasous from Este in the Veneto, and English brown and white plates once owned by a Patmiote sea captain.
Davide Lovatti11/31The kitchen window is unaltered from the previous owners. Probably designed in the 1920s. ‘I would have done it differently but I respect its quirkiness,’ says John.
Davide Lovatti12/31The kitchen is painted, Adonis blue, otherwise known as Bleu de France.
Davide Lovatti13/31In John's sitting room the low table was painted by a local fishermen. The tables are stone and cement with wooden tops inspired by the refectories in the monasteries of Mount Athos. One is a double-sided writing desk.
Davide Lovatti14/31JS Malcontenta chairs surround a table on the breakfast terrace.
Davide Lovatti15/31This room was once Teddy Millington Drake's studio, is now a bedroom. The JS four-poster bed of wood painted red. The oil paintings in ochre, orange, and mastic brown are a salute to the previous occupant.
Davide Lovatti16/31A screen painted by Teddy Millington Drake conceals hanging space. A planter’s chair is covered in a terra-cotta cotton.
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Davide Lovatti20/31This traditional sofra is a design prevalent in the Eastern Mediterranean and can be found as far east as Bokhara in Uzbekistan.
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Davide Lovatti22/31The buttress terrace is shaded by almond trees. JS came up with the idea to have a cement floor divided in rectangles by small, black pebbles brought from a remote beach.
Davide Lovatti23/31A collection of shells displayed on a buttress window sill.
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Davide Lovatti26/31John designed the table which is made from stone from a local quarry supported by whitewashed columns.
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Davide Lovatti28/31Teddy Millington Drake's whitewashed mausoleum is inscribed with XAIRE which means hail & goodbye in ancient greek.
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Davide Lovatti31/31An early-seventeenth-century pointed arch (the rounded arch came to Patmos ater) leads to a courtyard of the old Moscoudi house, with bougainvillea and jasmine exploding overhead. Leading from it is a bathroom belonging to guest bedroom. A red-striped canvas curtain covers a door leading to the jasmine exploding overhead. Leading from it is a bathroom belonging to a labyrinth of winding streets that surrounds the monastery.
