TATOÏ Club, Athens: Tennis, Wellness & Design Retreat

Plato argued that a beautiful place makes you think better. In the pines above Athens, a discreet club lavishes twenty hectares on proving him right: a world of architecture, sports and holistics.

Intro

When Plato wanted to think clearly, he left the city. He sent Socrates and Phaedrus out beyond the walls and sat them under a plane tree, beside a willow in flower, with cool water over their feet and cicadas overhead. The point, lightly made, was that a beautiful place is its own form of argument. You reason better in it. You become better company.

The architect Stelios Kois opens his project page on TATOÏ Club with that exact passage from the Phaedrus, and it is not an epigraph for show. Twenty-odd minutes north of Syntagma, in the pine-covered foothills of Mount Parnitha, sits a twenty-hectare site that Kois and the landscape architect Helli Pangalou have turned into a working answer to Plato's old question. From the road, you see almost nothing: a long, single-storey white wall, deliberately uninformative. Pass beyond it, and the argument begins.

The pioneer is its chief executive, Elli Vizantiou, and the idea was hers from the start. She wanted not a sporting club, but a holistic world in so much as a place with a philosophy, somewhere sport, design and architecture were held together under a single aesthetic of wellbeing. Touring comparable clubs around the world, she found none that carried all of it at once, and so she set the path for TATOÏ herself, opening it in 2012. Her rule was that nothing be arbitrary: the tennis courts, the jogging paths, the garden and the humble tomato grown in it, the very materials of the clubhouse, each element set on a foundation and knitted precisely to the next. Behind her, and characteristically out of frame, is the owner: John Mytilineos, the famously discreet industrialist and shipowner who keeps to the background here as in everything else. What Vizantiou built, in the end, is a single conviction made good in every particular: the part is never well unless the whole is well.

That conviction is really a philosophy of design. Kois's two educations, the monasteries of Mount Athos and the gardens and temples of Japan, meet in a single idea: that light, stone and silence can be arranged into a state of mind, and that a tennis court laid into a forest belongs to the same sentence as a broth from the kitchen. Sport is the alchemy at the centre of it, treated less as competition than as a discipline of living well, with the garden, the table and the clinic closing the circuit. Call it the Greek way, given an Eastern stillness: reason and repose worked into the same twenty hectares.

White bricks, stained ash and orchestrated light

Kois, raised near Mount Athos and trained in Rome and Japan, is allergic to a signature look. Each project, he likes to say, is born from its own ashes, and at TATOÏ that conviction has produced an architecture of cool restraint rather than statement. Long timber-clad rooms run low against the slope. The walls are laid by hand in long, thin courses of pale, sand-coloured brick, set on a base of raw concrete; the joinery is dark-stained ash; copper pendants, hammered by hand, hang over figured stone. Somewhere, true to the Phaedrus, cool water spills from a bronze channel against the brick. The double-height dining-and-lounge carries the hush of a country library, and the staircase asks for almost nothing: a single bronze figure on a stone plinth and then silence. Everywhere, daylight is treated as the principal material.

The interiors follow the same logic of subtraction. Stone, timber, copper and sand-coloured brick are left to speak plainly, warmed by the planting that presses up against every window. The mood is close to monastic, the sort of room that makes you lower your voice and stay longer than you meant to. Texture does the work that pattern usually does elsewhere: the grain of figured stone, the dull glow of hammered copper, the deep matte of stained ash.

The same restraint carries into the guesthouse, where six rooms and two suites, eight keys in all, are open to non-members booked onto the sport-and-wellness retreats and holistic programmes. It is the way to experience TATOÏ without an introduction: a tennis or padel intensive, or a few quiet days built around the yoga lawn, the cookhouse and the table. Timber, stone and daylight indoors, the pine forest at the glass. Stay, and the dialogue is no longer something you visit for an afternoon; it runs the length of your week.

Tsitsipas, Sakkari and Cryotherapy

Aerial view of clay tennis courts in the pine forest at TATOÏ Club Athens | The Aficionados.com

Tennis is the founding programme, and it still holds the centre. Seventeen courts, mostly clay and built to a professional standard, sit inside the pine forest rather than carved out of it. Mature trees are pressed right against the netting; the floodlights are slim and dark; seen from above, the whole layout reads as landscape architecture rather than infrastructure. The Greek players Stefanos Tsitsipas and Maria Sakkari train here, which tells you the surfaces are serious. Two padel courts were added in 2024, and a larger spa is in development, but the founding discipline still sets the tone for everything around it.

Around the courts, the wellness programme ramifies. Mornings begin with yoga by the small lake. There is a clinical side, too: physiotherapy training, clinical Pilates, cryotherapy and nutritional therapy, the aim being to evaluate, restore and maintain physical function, or, more to the point, to stay healthy. The thinking is the same one that runs through the architecture: mind and body are not separate problems to be solved in separate rooms.

Ecology, Aleppo Pines and Herbary

Natural swimming pond fringed by Garden with Italian cypresses, verbena and the Parnitha mountains | Tatio Club Athens | The Aficionados

The twenty hectares are the work of Helli Pangalou's Athens practice, whose other projects include the Stavros Niarchos Park with Renzo Piano and houses on Paros with John Pawson. She has tuned the planting to the rugged flora of Parnitha itself: Aleppo pine, oaks, pistacias, rosemary, with herb gardens threaded between the courts. There is no real edge to any of it. Courts, herb beds and a willow-fringed swimming pond give way without a fence to the wild pine slopes of Parnitha beyond, so the club reads less as something built on the mountain than grown into it. Shade is handled as a material in its own right: the pine canopy and the willows trailing over the water do most of the work, with a colonnade and a single scarlet sail where the trees thin out. Against the clubhouse brick she has set acanthus, the bear's breeches whose leaves the Corinthians once carved into their capitals, the oldest ornament in Greek architecture returned here to the living plant. The club has replanted 1,081 trees and 9,873 large shrubs along Erythraias Road, working from a study by a multidisciplinary team that included an ecologist and an anthropologist.

Tomatoes, Kale and the Farm

Watering the chemical-free vegetable garden by hand at TATOÏ Club Athens | The Aficionados.com

Glasshouse and organic vegetable beds among the pines at TATOÏ Club | The Aficionados.com

The food story is unusually integral. On the estate itself, an organic farm and a glasshouse grow the vegetables, fruit and herbs, the tomatoes, the kale and the rest, raised without chemicals across a deliberately mixed planting and picked to order rather than to a delivery schedule, with the herb gardens doubling as the kitchen's larder and anything else coming from growers nearby. Everything is then made in-house with the club's nutritionist, from the snacks by the pool to breakfast and the all-day restaurant, on a principle of balance rather than abstinence: eating well treated as part of being well, the move that closes the circle between the farm, the body and the courts. The bakery's carob-flour loaf has become the house signature. As Vizantiou has put it, the farm doesn't make commercial sense, but it makes other kinds of sense, which is as good a summary of the whole place as you will find.

Twenty minutes, another world

TATOÏ Club lies in the foothills of Mount Parnitha, roughly twenty minutes north of Syntagma Square, close to Varibobi and Erythraias Road. It is far enough from the city to feel like Plato's country, near enough that Athens and the airport remain within easy reach.

The altitude and the greenery do something measurable, too. Like neighbouring Kifissia, the wealthy garden suburb a short drive south that has been the summer retreat of Athenians since Roman times, the foothills here run a few degrees cooler than the city centre, the work of the pine, the hills and the mountain above. Kifissia is also where the good shops are: designer boutiques, jewellers and serious restaurants clustered around its leafy main square and along Kassaveti and Kolokotroni streets, the natural place to point a member who wants an afternoon off the courts.

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TATOÏ Club

Intro

White bricks, stained ash and orchestrated light

Tsitsipas, Sakkari and Cryotherapy

Ecology, Aleppo Pines and Herbary

Tomatoes, Kale and the Farm

Twenty minutes, another world

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L'AND Vineyards

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Forsthofgut

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Intro

White bricks, stained ash and orchestrated light

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Ecology, Aleppo Pines and Herbary

Tomatoes, Kale and the Farm

Twenty minutes, another world

editors PICK

Hotel - Alentejo, Portugal

L'AND Vineyards

HOTEL - Leogang, Austria

Forsthofgut

Hotel - Fethiye, Türkiye

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