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Our journey to Karpathos.
After dragging my ‘poor’ family around countless Greek islands to find ‘the one’ on which to find a humble property to call our own, we landed in Karpathos in July 2019, one of the islands in the Dodecanese and it was love at first sight. As ever the people we met played a big part but the wild, rugged beauty of herb clad mountains and pine trees down to pebbly beaches and turquoise water just got me immediately!
I got back to the UK and sent out some random emails asking ‘please could you help me find a small property in Karpathos’ and got an amazing response from Tina who said ‘sure thing, come back in September and we will take you round some places… and oh, my husband, Manolis, is an architect!’ So we did and my priority was ‘must be able to walk to the sea’.
I couldn’t find anywhere near the sea and so settled on a small mountain property which I put heart and soul into making happen… very long story short, the guy trying to sell me it didn’t actually own it – as played out in the lawyer’s office one morning in Pigadia, the island’s main town! Practising what I preach of ‘everything happens for a reason’ , I remained calm, told myself it wasn’t near the sea and so not right anyway and listened to Manolis telling me that a plot of land had just come up that was walking distance to the beach – it was not on the market, owned by a lady keen to sell. I forgot to say, apart from insisting my property be by the sea, I was also adamant that I was definitely not going to build a house…..
I fell in the love with the plot! In a heartbeat I got on board with the fact I was going to have to design and build a house and had tea with the lovely owner who promised that she would sell it to me regardless of how long it would take – we were about to Brexit and I dreaded to think how long it would take – suffice to say it was painstaking.
Whilst we were jumping through all the extra bureaucratic hoops necessitated from the UK exiting the EU I managed to find someone to back me enough to grant me a mortgage – the lovely Nikos somehow secured me a loan to build the house from a well known Greek bank. Manolis, Tina and I went back and forth with the plans until we had it nailed – and planning was granted. This is a shortened version of events – the longer one includes the lady who manned one of the offices dealing with my permission having covid (along with her six children) and so the office was shut for six weeks, one man in Pigadia had simply turned his phone off and hadn’t been to his office because of the pandemic and so missed multiple calls requesting action on my application…and so on. Tina and Manolis remained positive and brilliant all the way through.
In September 2021 I started Greek language lessons figuring that if I was going to join a community on a Greek island then I should at least learn the basics. I should say I am not a linguist, I have found it excruciatingly difficult but I have also loved the journey. Suffice to say I have basic Greek (I told my tiler that I loved him rather than the tiles he had just put in the house!) which I hope will only be enhanced with more time on the island.
In May 2023 we broke ground, about 2.5 years after beginning my journey as a house builder! In Karpathos there is no building during the summer months because of the heat but otherwise Manolis and his team progressed brilliantly over a period of two years. Of course, there were challenges along the way but all able to be over come thanks to Tina’s relentless ability to tackle every challenge positively looking for new solutions.
I had a few very clear ideas that I wanted to incorporate into the build. I wanted to use reclaimed materials for the final finish and so found Silo Art Gallery near Nafplio on Google…there began a great relationship with Stelios and wife Georgia who have a huge treasure trove of reclaimed items and so I was able to choose all my doors (internal and external), old window shutters that I wanted to use for the kitchen cupboards and a huge array of cupboards, mirrors, tables and benches. I spent hours searching in their barns and Stelios was brilliant at collecting it all, mending where needed and shipping it all to Karpathos where we kept it in store until we were ready to use it.
I also wanted bold wall tiles that I could not find in Greece – so I found Zaid on Google, who makes his tiles in Marrakech, Morocco. It took hours and hours to sift through all his designs, use them to create my own ideas and then for them to be made and shipped to the island.
Otherwise, all the labour used was Greek or Albanian and it has been lovely to meet and get to know the guys that Manolis uses regularly who all patiently listened to the ‘look’ I wanted to create and were happy to get on board with my sometimes wild colour schemes!
So now I am pinching myself that I have actually pulled it off – HUGE and everlasting thanks and love to Manolis and Tina for being the real dream team behind my project. We, as a family, now have a cool place to lay our hat on an unspoilt Greek island with the most stunning sea view and, yes, a track down to the beach…..I look forward to welcoming you….
