Mykonos has been a beach-club island for the last decade. It has not been a hotel island. That asymmetry — vast spending on the sand, mediocre rooms in which to sleep it off — ends this June, when Four Seasons and Barrière open within four weeks of each other on opposite sides of the south coast.
The Four Seasons Mykonos opens on 26 June above Kalo Livadi, on the east side of the island, with ninety-four rooms, two infinity pools and a Cycladic-village layout by the Greek architect Nicos Valsamakis. It is the brand's second property in Greece after the Astir Palace in Athens, and the first time the group has agreed to the island after fifteen years of saying no. The site — cliffside, twenty minutes from Chora, with its own beach — is the best the island had left.
Fouquet's Mykonos opens 27 June at Paraga, on the south coast, twenty minutes west — and it is the more interesting building of the two. Sixty-one suites and three private villas; a Rock Spa with hyperbaric chamber, ice bath, flotation tank; a basketball court carved directly into the cliff; and, unusually for Mykonos, an indoor swimming pool, which during the meltemi winds in August is not a detail. The dining is a Roka residency — robata grill, the London brand's first Mediterranean address — which will, in practice, do more than the rooms to define the property's first season.
The reading is not that Mykonos is finally getting good hotels. The reading is that Mykonos is pivoting. The island spent fifteen years selling itself to a younger, louder, less hotel-dependent visitor — the Nammos client, the bottle-service client, the Scorpios afternoon. That market has been compressed and overserved, and the island knows it. What Four Seasons and Barrière are betting on is the next client: forty-five, mature, willing to spend eight nights instead of three, and unwilling to do that without a real hotel underneath.
The summer will tell us whether the bet works. Both properties are taking July at near full occupancy on the strength of brand alone. The interesting test is September — when the bottle-service crowd has gone home, the meltemi calms, and the island has its three best weeks of weather. If the rooms hold their September occupancy, Mykonos has succeeded at reinventing itself.
For the planning: Four Seasons for the family week, Fouquet's for the couple's. Both are bookable now.
— Camille Vedy
