Designer John Stefanidis and artist Teddy Millington-Drake's house on Patmos
I will never forget the first time I was invited to dinner at interior designer John Stefanidis’s house in Patmos, one of the islands in the Dodecanese. The evening began with vodka and fresh watermelon juice on a garden terrace shaded by citrus and olive trees. Erudite and charming, John is captivating. I could easily imagine he and his partner, British artist Teddy Millington-Drake, discovering Patmos long before it was fashionable and falling in love with a seventeenth-century house that had no running water or electricity.
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Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Stefanidis understands the Mediterranean. Its light, colors, and nature are the prevailing inspirations. All the walls of the house, inside and out, are whitewashed to reflect light and deflect heat. The colors are the blues of the sea and sky, and the interior blends seamlessly into the exterior. Rooms open to terraces, terraces flow into gardens, gardens expand into farmland. The fragrance of jasmine, roses, and gardenias fills the air.
Stefanidis mixes local wood furniture with his collection of Anglo-Indian, Venetian, and English pieces. Layers of Greek and Ottoman embroidery pillows are paired with Indian textiles and Turkish rugs. Teddy Millington-Drake’s watercolors of ancient temples and monuments hang amid framed pages from a book of Indian costumes. Stefanidis’s house is much like his personality — worldly yet effortlessly relaxed and engaging. As he wrote in his book An Island Sanctuary, “A house, your living space, is a sanctuary. Your bed is where you dream. Your kitchen is where you drink coffee or juice, eat breakfast, perhaps lunch or dinner too. Whether it is a room, a house, an apartment, or a loft in Paris, New York, Rio or Mumbai, your sanctuary reflects your personality.”
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This extract is taken from Near & Far: Interiors I Love by Lisa Fine, photography by Miguel Flores-Vianna. Published by Vendome Press, available in all good bookstores and online (September 2019, £50).
Miguel Flores-Vianna1/15Stefanidis found the elaborately carved, eighteenth-century Tuscan mirror in Rome. The block print from Rajasthan covering the banquette beneath the mirror and the natural blue, red, and ochre of the kilim add touches of organic color.
Miguel Flores-Vianna2/15In the main sitting room, everything is white, nutmeg brown, and copper. Cotton mattresses rest on Empire-style sofas. Large double windows with shutters of local wood, typical of the island, open to farmland and the ocean beyond.
Miguel Flores-Vianna3/15This sitting room features two John Stefanidis Rothschild chairs, loosely slipcovered in a crisp blue-and-white cotton stripe, an eighteenth-century gilt Venetian mirror, and an Indian chest inlaid with ivory.
Miguel Flores-Vianna4/15A simple trestle table made on the island serves as a desk.
Miguel Flores-Vianna5/15The double doors with glazed panels are an architectural feature of many houses on the island. The Mughal chest was sent from India to England in the 1820s. The chair is eighteenth-century Italian Baroque.
Miguel Flores-Vianna6/15A small sitting room that opens onto the breakfast terrace is furnished with a typical local wood sofa with a white cotton mattress.
Miguel Flores-Vianna7/15A plate rack displays a collection of Teddy Millington-Drake’s ceramic plates in primary colors.
Miguel Flores-Vianna8/15This coffee table was painted by a local fisherman in a naïve style.
Miguel Flores-Vianna9/15In this sitting alcove, almost everything on the walls is either Indian or inspired by India: Teddy Millington-Drake’s watercolors of south Indian temples, miniatures of Indian gods, costume designs of Indian castes, mirrors framed in gold passementerie. The embroidered pillows on the wall-to-wall sofa are from Patmos, Rhodes, and Anatolia.
Miguel Flores-Vianna10/15The small blue table with red trim is a Stefanidis design. Others in various colors are seen throughout the house.
Miguel Flores-Vianna11/15The window ledge holds a collection of shells from the Greek islands and white stone from Aspronisi, an island in the Santorini archipelago renowned for its white cliffs.
Miguel Flores-Vianna12/15The nineteenth-century four-poster bed is brass and painted metal. The fifty-year-old bed hangings have hand-crocheted hems.
Miguel Flores-Vianna13/15Vintage hand-painted plates from Samos rest on the sky-blue shelves in the master bathroom. The trellis-fronted cabinet is reminiscent of the latticework found in the harems of Constantinople, Cairo, and Damascus and popular in the islands of the Dodecanese when it was under Turkish domination.
Miguel Flores-Vianna14/15Detail of the intricate ivory inlay on the Mughal chest. Images of flora and fauna were popular themes among the Mughals, who were inspired by the lush gardens of Persia.
Miguel Flores-Vianna15/15The Plumbago Terrace, shaded by olive trees and cypresses, is a magical place for afternoon tea or evening cocktails. It looks out on an herb garden terrace with beds of mint, thyme, parsley, coriander, and arugula. Pots of white agapanthus and trailing pelargonium add to the lush Mediterranean atmosphere.
