Review: Parilio Hotel
Intro
‘Cycladic Light Simplicity’ – I don’t know what it is about anyone describing anything to me as simple, but it goes straight to my heart because it’s exactly what I’m looking for in the world these days.
Simplicity.
In a world that’s crazy, I have never craved simplicity more. Perhaps this is why I feel so drawn to Greece. The beach, food, the white and blue blanket of colour that covers everything. It feels so timeless and so easy.
Parilio hotel is certainly a luxury hotel, so although its vision is 'simplicity' it has considered every single detail with great thought. What feels like simplicity for us is because of an awful lot of beautiful work that’s gone into the background.
When we arrived in Paros we planned on exploring the island – which you’d assume from a travel photographer but, we couldn’t have planned for how amazing Parilio would be, and how we’d end up deciding to just stop for 3 days and switch off from the world. We weren’t sure if we’d ever get to go back to this amazing place so we wanted to enjoy every single minute.
With that being said, let’s review. Spoiler alert – we loved it.
the hotel
Designed by Athens-based Interior Design Laboratorium and led by Kalia & Antonis Eliopoulos,
Parilio was opened in July 2019 one summer season before the pandemic. So, it’s likely to be on many bucket lists around the globe. People who are planning their once-in-a-lifetime post-pandemic holiday to Greece would have likely pinned or saved the stunning photos out there of Parilio Hotel.
The hotel is located on Naoussa bay, between Kolympithres Beach and the super cute fishing village of Naoussa. Parilio has 33 suites, a spa, and an amazing restaurant on site – Mr E. The grounds are so beautiful. It was very hard for me to leave my camera in the room sometimes.
Price-wise, rooms start at around 300euro per night up to 700 euro a night depending on the month you choose to visit. We can’t usually afford the latter but, we managed to get a great deal for September as I booked 8 months early (I was in a lockdown ok?) and, it was somewhere we’ll remember forever.
The service was great, particularly the staff who worked by the pool who made our stay. I admire these people greatly. They work so hard in the summertime before the season ends and they head home to rest (or keep working!) It was nice to meet lots of different people from all over Greece who were in Paros for the summer.
the rooms
We booked one of the standard rooms and it was huge. Giant bed, air conditioning, great wifi, big TV, and just good architectural vibe. We had a giant balcony overlooking the pool where you could often find us drinking wine or eating club sandwiches – I’ll get to the club sandwich soon. Our room was extremely quiet too and we slept well.
There is a range of different suites available across the hotel. Some have a pool or a jacuzzi, but all of the suites are designed for privacy. We booked the Aurora suite and it was on the first floor in the main building.
THE food
The breakfast! Ok, imagine you have a menu full of all types of breakfasts. Starting with smoothies and coffee, fruits, yoghurt, rice pudding, and mueslis before moving to eggs, crepes, or pancakes. So, you’ve got a killer menu in front of you and then you find out that you can have anything you want...and as much of anything as you want. Yep, we’d wake up and almost run to breakfast each morning.
The hotel has an app where you can order anything you want straight to your room throughout the day. The restaurant also serves dinner and we’ve heard it’s equally as good which doesn’t surprise us at all. When breakfast is included at a hotel – especially one like this, we tend to eat in the morning and then have a super early dinner. This leads me to the club sandwich. Now, we like to only eat local food when we travel so we would never order a burger or a club sandwich when in Greece but when we arrived we were so hungry and couldn’t go out to explore yet so we shared a club sandwich and well, we were hooked. It’s probably the only time I’ll recommend a club sandwich to you guys – ever.
the pool
We planned on exploring all of Paros. Like my point about food above – we would never just travel somewhere to stay in a hotel and never leave it. We travel to take in everything and well, we should have explored Paros more because what surprised us was how we felt about being by the pool at Parilio.
We just didn’t get tired of it. Every time we planned to go somewhere we both just felt so exhausted, so we ended up deciding that we just need to calm down and take some time to stop. We needed to simplify and take the pressure off. Of course, we did see a little bit of Paros but our days at Parilio were spent in the pool and by the pool reading books and switching off from the madness of 2021.
Thank you Parilio for the Cycladic light simplicity.
Kinda sounds like somewhere you might enjoy visiting right?
Save it for the future. We know you’ll love it.
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G-B x
