Hotel of the Week: A Family’s Art Collection Finds Its Setting on Paros
Sophie Khoury, curator Artemis Baltoyanni, and the Elie Khouri Art Foundation team spent nearly two years placing works by 55 artists in dialogue with Paros’s mythology and material culture
White plaster, stone walls, and an Aegean horizon have become the Cycladic hotel uniform; Luura Cliff gives the eye somewhere else to land. At the new 39-suite hotel above Agia Eirini Bay on Paros’s western coast, works by 55 artists, drawn from private collections and new commissions, occupy suites and terraced public spaces, offering a unique visual foil to the sweeping vistas toward Antiparos. Newly opened, Luura Cliff is the first destination for the Khoury family’s hospitality brand, Vivium, and marks the Greek debut for Morgans Originals, a collection of boutique properties under the Ennismore umbrella of hotels.
“We didn’t want to finish the architecture and interiors and then simply fill the spaces with art,” says Sophie Khoury, Vivium’s head of hospitality. “The two needed to develop alongside each other.”
Curator Artemis Baltoyanni joined the project while Elastic Architects and Lambs and Lions were shaping the site. No single artwork dictated an architectural decision; instead, examples were tested against the scale of its room, the sightline through a doorway, and the island light reaching its surface.
Elastic Architects treated the destination’s slope as an organizing device, setting horizontal volumes into the terrain as they descend toward the sea. Low walls and subtle changes in level inform passages and terraces, layering shared spaces with private ones while keeping the water in sight. The central pool anchors the communal areas. Timber pergolas break the noon light into bands of shadow. Every suite opens to a terrace, while 19 add a private pool.
Berlin-based Lambs and Lions, whose Greek-island portfolio includes Scorpios Mykonos and OKU Kos, designed the interiors. At Luura Cliff, the studio trades optic white for bone-toned plaster and dark timber beams, then warms the rooms further with tobacco-colored textiles and olive upholstery. Round-headed portals and deep, dark-edged windows keep changing where the eyes go, first a painting, then a strip of Aegean blue. Low banquettes and broad slab tables sit beneath those sightlines, leaving the stronger color to the canvases.
Khoury and her father, collector and patron Elie Khouri, developed the art program with Baltoyanni and the Elie Khouri Art Foundation team. Over nearly two years, they revisited holdings assembled across more than two decades and commissioned new work for the hotel’s scale and setting. “What is distinctly ours is the taste behind the selection,” Khoury shares. “Every artist is someone whose work we love and genuinely admire.”
Francesco Clemente, Claire Tabouret, Judith Hopf, and Matthew Darbyshire appear alongside Greek and regional artists Sofia Mitsola, Kostas Paniaras, and Vasilis Papageorgiou. A guest encounters the collection along the ordinary route of a stay. Paintings, prints, sculpture, and ceramics appear throughout suites, gathering rooms, and the grounds. With artworks dispersed through the property, it feels closer to moving through a collector’s home than touring a hospitality showpiece.
Baltoyanni keyed the collection to mythology and marble, twin Parian inheritances. Khoury says the island’s ancient Sanctuary of Asclepius, associated with healing and dreams, prompted a thread of transformation and the search for meaning. She cites Sophie von Hellermann’s Double Fantasy and Pippa El-Kadhi Brown’s Milk of the Moon as examples.
Elsewhere, the program moves through memory, the body, and slowed time. Greek ceramic artist Maria Economides brings contemporary craft into daily use through bespoke pieces for guest rooms and shared spaces. She also leads workshops on site, putting applied art directly into guests’ hands.
Tschabalala Self’s Leda provides the collection’s most arresting encounter. Drawn from the family holdings, the roughly 64-by-84-inch work combines oil, acrylic, Flashe, linen, and dry leaf on canvas. Painted passages meet visible seams and brittle leaf as Self recasts a Greek myth historically filtered through idealized female bodies. “You are looking at a story that has existed for centuries, but through a contemporary lens and in a completely different context,” Khoury describes.
Luura Cliff will suit the traveler who wants a private pool above the Aegean just as much as they crave information on the maker of a bedside vessel the opportunity to enjoy a hands-on lesson with the artist.
That habit of looking closely is what the young brand intends to carry forward. Paros Sand follows at New Golden Beach in 2028, then Luura Athens in the trendy Koukaki neighborhood, each with its own site-responsive program. “The art should always feel rooted in where you are, rather than applying the same program everywhere,” says Khoury.
Luura Cliff establishes the standard. Every address will have to earn its own collection and its own relationship to place.