Every great Greek welcome begins with a door left open.
In the 1950s the Greek State set out to build a country worth visiting. Its instrument was the Xenia programme, a chain of state hotels raised on the most beautiful and storied ground in Greece, from empty coastlines to the edges of ancient sites. The work drew in a remarkable generation of modernist architects, led by Charalambos Sfaellos and Aris Konstantinidis, who treated even a place to sleep as architecture worth getting right.
Kos, birthplace of Hippocrates, dense with antiquity and ringed by sand, belonged on that list from the start. In the 1960s Philippos Vokos, one of the finest architects of the post-war years, designed its Xenia on Vasileos Georgiou street: in the heart of town, steps from the market, yet turned wholly toward the sea. Named Theoxenia, it all but began modern tourism on the island. It stood with quiet grace beside the old Italian buildings, and across its forty-two rooms it took in travellers come for the Greek sun and scholars come for Hippocrates alike.
“The Xenia did not put a wall between the guest and the sea. We promised never to build one either.”
Turning the Theoxenia into the Kos Aktis Art Hotel meant touching almost everything, and changing as little as possible. The architecture Vokos left was sound; the work was to open it further to the light. Oak at the reception, glass where there had been wall, new floors underfoot, the gardens replanted and lit, the kitchen rebuilt, and every room remade around the one thing that never needed improving: the view.
Drag to watch the Xenia become Kos Aktis.
Ten months of work later, in 2005, the doors opened again, now as the Kos Aktis Art Hotel, for islanders and travellers from anywhere. We’ve stayed open all year ever since, on purpose. The hotel put people to work and gave the young a reason to build a life in tourism here; it made room for the place itself: local producers on the table, musicians in the bar, artists on the walls. Owners, staff and guests, we keep alive the idea the Xenia was built on: a Greece that is generous, modern, and open to the world.
Then, in 2026, we did it all again. A second renovation, as complete as the first, moved through the hotel room by room, and brought with it seven new seaside suites at the water’s edge: the closest Kos Aktis has ever stood to the Aegean, and the rooms that make today’s forty-nine.
Through the years
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The promise is best understood from a room.
Forty-nine of them, every one facing the Aegean: the same horizon the Xenia was built to share.
