Boutique Hotel
A house at the center of the circle
Villa Cyclades is a twelve-room house on Contadora Island. We imagined it the way a house in the Cyclades is imagined: white walls that throw back the light, stone and wood, shade when the sun beats down, windows that let the sea in.
It isn’t a resort, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a small place, for just a few people at a time, where the team knows your name and the island sets the rhythm of the day.
Kyklos · the circle
Kyklos: a circle around the light
I Delos
Our name is no accident. Cyclades comes from the Greek kyklos, circle: they are the Aegean islands that surround Delos. As the myth goes, Delos was a wandering island, adrift, until Leto came to it to give birth. At that moment the island took root on the seabed, and there Apollo, the god of light, and his sister Artemis were born. Ever since, all the other islands have circled around it.
II Contadora
Contadora was a center too. In colonial times, pearls from all over the archipelago were brought here to be counted before crossing the ocean. Two islands in two seas, and one idea: a place everything comes back to.
III You
That’s why each of our twelve rooms is named after an island in the Cyclades. Together they form a circle. And at the center, you.
Arquitectura
The light of the islands
In the Cyclades, architecture grows out of what is at hand: whitewash to throw back the sun, local stone, wood, and the blue of the sea repeated on doors and windows. Villa Cyclades follows that same instinct in the tropics: natural materials, pale walls and spaces that let the breeze through.
Each room also has its own color, taken from its island: the sand of Serifos, the pearl gray of Tinos marble, the deep blue of Santorini, the olive green of Andros. Twelve different palettes for twelve stories.
The island
Contadora Island: the Aegean in the Pacific
Contadora is in the Pearl Islands archipelago, in the Gulf of Panama, just under two hours by ferry from the city. It’s a small island with no traffic, where you get around on foot or by golf cart. It has beaches that are almost empty on weekdays, reefs a few minutes away by boat, and a history that runs from the pearls of colonial times to the peace initiative that bears its name.
Here the Aegean and the Pacific meet in more than the landscape: in an unhurried way of life, facing the sea.