Capturing the Wonders of Mushrooms Through Dance

01.08.2024 - 16:43 / nytimes.com

Amid the cafes and boutiques of Athens’s Kolonaki neighborhood is a housewares shop that’s also a showcase for Greek craftsmanship. It’s the first brick-and-mortar location for Crini & Sophia, the brand that the former interior and set designer Maya Zafeiropoulou-Martinou founded in 2022. Its wood-and-rattan shelves, two-tone marble floors and furniture are all made by Greek artists, while one window is decorated with a vinelike steel and spray-paint piece by the Cypriot sculptor Socrates Socratous. The shop’s goods are designed by Zafeiropoulou-Martinou, whose inspirations include the colors in Francis Bacon paintings and the Amazon rainforest. Linens are produced in Portugal before being embroidered in Greece with patterns that often take cues from antiques on view at Athens’s Benaki Museum. Hand-painted ceramics and glassware are made in partnership with artisans in New York, Greece, Italy and France. When it comes to designing your own table, Zafeiropoulou-Martinou encourages layering. “The pattern isn’t just the plate or the tablecloth,” she says of her pieces, “but a puzzle of the two on top of each other.”

Silver Sands, a midcentury motel on Long Island’s North Fork, had seen better days by the time Alexander Perros happened upon it on a weekend drive in 2014 and experienced what he describes as “this combination of melancholy and nostalgia.” He had no grand plans, and yet Perros, who has worked on the business side of design companies, including Lindsey Adelman Studio, ended up acquiring the property with his friend the restaurateur Ryan Hardy. Open since last June, Perros’s reimagined version of it nods to the past while somehow still feeling current. Maybe it’s that the 20-room main building, which wraps around a courtyard with views of Peconic Bay, was painted with fresh coats of coral and teal, or a host of smaller touches, like the fact that the room numbers appear on vibrant ceramic shells by the artist Lucie de Moyencourt. Visitors could already opt for free-standing cottages or bungalows. Now, with the completion of two beach houses, the microresort, as Perros calls it, can accommodate larger parties who want their own space (they each have three bedrooms). For Plato’s Beach House, Perros and his wife, Anna Perros, who took the lead on the pre-existing structures’ interiors, were inspired “by the sea and sky — there are lots of blues, yellows and pinks,” he says. The second place, Casa de Buddy, had “deep, groovy ’70s vibes,” which they preserved with vintage pieces such as a snakelike De Sede DS 600 Modular Sofa and a playful palm tree lamp by the artist Mario Lopez Torres. Both houses have private gardens and full kitchens, though their occupants will likely still want to venture