I still remember our very first guest. Not one of the first. The first.
We had opened our doors only a few weeks earlier, in June 2021.
It was our first season, and a rather unusual time to begin. The world was only just starting to travel again after the long months of Covid restrictions, Santorini was slowly coming back to life, and we had opened much later in the year than a normal season would begin.
Then, in early July, she arrived. Our first guest.
The first person to experience the houses not as family homes, not as a project we had been working on, but as the place we hoped they had finally become.
I don’t think I realised at the time how important that first guest would remain to me.
When you create something, you spend so long looking at it from the inside that eventually you lose the ability to see it as somebody else does.
I knew every wall. Every piece of furniture. Every decision we had made.
I knew what had been repaired, what had been preserved, what had been moved — and what I had stubbornly refused to move.
She knew none of that. She simply arrived.
Afterwards, she wrote about the breakfast, the sunset, and how the houses had felt like home.
And then she wrote one final sentence:
“I recommend visiting Maria — what she has there is incredible and my words cannot describe it… it can only be felt with the heart.”
I have never forgotten it.
At first, I suppose, I simply took it as a beautiful compliment.
I didn’t know it was going to become a responsibility.
Because years passed. Things needed repairing. Others needed replacing. New ideas appeared. Expectations changed. Hospitality changed. Santorini changed. And, inevitably, I changed things too.
But strangely enough, whenever I consider changing something that feels more significant, I still find myself going back to her.
Not literally, of course.
She has no idea that she has been sitting on an imaginary design committee for all these years.
But she has.
I look at whatever I am considering and ask myself a question: Would this change disturb whatever it was that she felt?
It is not always an easy question to answer.
Old houses cannot be preserved in glass. They need to remain comfortable. Bathrooms need updating. Mattresses need replacing. Fabrics wear out. Technology moves on. Guests have different needs from the ones they had when we first opened. And sometimes a chair is simply a chair and needs to go.
I am not trying to create a museum.
But there is a difference between changing what needs to change and gradually changing so much that, one day, you realise you have polished away the very thing that made the place special.
That is the part that worries me.
Because, after all these years, I am still not entirely sure what she felt. Perhaps that is precisely why her words have stayed with me. She had already told us that she loved the breakfast. She had already told us that the sunset was the most romantic she had ever seen. She had already said that the houses felt like home.
All of those things made me enormously happy.
But then she tried to describe something else and couldn’t. She could only tell us that it had to be felt with the heart.
Feelings are much more difficult to renovate.
So, all these years later, our first guest still occasionally gets a vote.
She doesn’t know when I am considering a new piece of furniture.
She has never been informed that I am debating whether something should be replaced.
And she has certainly never been asked to approve a colour.
Still, somewhere in my head, I ask her. Would it still feel the same?
I hope the answer is yes.
Because guests come and guests leave. Most take photographs and memories with them, and leave a few memories with us in return.
But every now and then, someone leaves something more.
Our first guest left me a sentence.
I have been taking care of it ever since.