TRAVEL GUIDE | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

 

Just an hour from Athens, Aegina is a quieter, lesser-known counterpoint to the Greek Summer, but no less special. Athens-based travel writer Kate Lough explores its pistachio groves, neoclassical harbour life, ancient ruins, and hidden swimming coves. A place of soft light and slower rhythms, she finds Greece at its most intimate, tactile, and unexpectedly timeless.

 

BY KATE LOUGH | CABANA TRAVEL | 25 JULY 2026

   

Navigating the rabbit warren of Kypseli’s lanes, a short drive from Aegina town, it is easy to lose your way. Pushing through worn metal gates, a svelte dachshund bounces past a battered Renault to greet me and the final hours of a scorching afternoon start to drench a house in amber. A small constellation of artistic dwellings on Aegina’s northern curve, the Amber Houses are nested by pistachio trees that would soften with blossom any day now. A self-described ‘microcosmos’, Amber is also a family home, chiselled into form by its Greek-Swedish heritage and its current custodians, Matilda and Ion Percy.

In 1984, the pair’s parents, Swedish artist Anne Percy and Greek artist Kostas Ladopoulos, bought a piece of farmland with 60 pistachio trees overlooking the Saronic Gulf. “It was the first land they saw for sale in the newspaper and that was that,” explains Matilda. “It had a well and a real farmhouse — they couldn’t believe their eyes.”

Across the field is Terra, the original farmhouse, with its wonky floors and thick stone walls, where Anne still shelters every year from the Swedish winter; in between, a studio provides space for their new photography workshops; while a cave house with two connected chambers was chipped into life by their mother and architect grandfather. More recently, it was “made alive as a house” by Matilda’s first guest, Stefan, whose three day stay turned into six years.

For the Amber House itself, Anne and Kostas worked with the Greek architect Giorgos Makris in the early 90s, as a way to create a double story studio space for themselves. Matilda and Ion spent their first childhood years here before relocating to Sweden, “eating ice cream on its spiral staircase” as light filtered through stained glass panels in the roof. Matilda returned in 2018, with Ion following last summer, and slowly slowly the Amber Houses came into being, evolving with each turn of the calendar. 

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