Despite a canonical place in the annals of art and architecture history, Greece has been quiet on the contemporary design scene. Earlier this month, though, the inaugural Athens Design Forum offered a confident counter-narrative — one that asserts the country’s creative relevancy. Conceived and helmed entirely by the young Greek-American curator and writer Katerina Papanikolopoulos, the Forum seeks to “mark Athens as both an emerging and historically established center of creative production.” To do so, she brought together a diverse cast of creators and programmed various activations spanning generations, disciplines, and neighborhoods — all with the type of warm hospitality that, one afternoon, found me enjoying a slice of carrot cake in the famed 85-year-old Greek artist Alekos Fassianos’s living room. Forgoing the oft-detached formality of conventional design fairs, Papanikolopoulos sought to produce an event that embraced the experimental as well as the personal: “I wanted to showcase the process and interiority of designers more than the final products,” she says.

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Alekos Fassianos Estate

A high point of my week and a half in Greece, visiting the private home and studio of the celebrated Greek painter Alekos Fassianos was an exhilarating experience. The artist’s insatiable creativity was on full display: His self-designed family home in the Athens suburb of Papagos is bursting with paintings and prints as well as furniture, textiles, ceramics, sculptural light fixtures, and cast metal flourishes — all created over the years by the octogenarian.