THE GREEK DESIGNER Leda Athanasopoulou — whose practice spans jewelry, furniture and interiors — has spent her life in Athens, London, New York and Paris. But when the 34-year-old thinks of home, her mind immediately goes to Patmos, the rocky, secluded Dodecanese island near the coast of Turkey where her mother, Katerina Tsigarida, an esteemed Greek architect, and father, Dimitris, a businessman, started buying property in the early 1990s, when their three children were young. As a girl, Athanasopoulou spent every summer in Chora, the island’s preserved, whitewashed village, baked into a hill and crowned by an 11th-century Christian monastery, roaming between her family’s house and those of her friends. In the middle of Chora, where cars are forbidden (not that they’d fit through the winding stone paths anyway), she would pass the bakery, its ringed sesame koulouri still made fresh every morning, and, across the street, an imposing mansion with a blocky front staircase and just a few windows across its fortresslike facade. “I didn’t notice the house, to be honest,” says Athanasopoulou on a hot September afternoon. “There are so many beautiful houses here, and you often have no idea who lives in them.”

But now she’s the one who lives there, having purchased the 5,400-square-foot, two-story property — which also has a 440-square-foot terrace on its top floor, connecting three of its five bedrooms — five years ago. When she first considered buying it, Athanasopoulou realized that one reason she hadn’t been familiar with the building was that it had been uninhabited since the 1980s. Its last restoration was likely in the early 20th century, when the residents incorporated various neo-Classical elements: intricately patterned cement tiles in a few common spaces; exterior shutters on newly enlarged windows; a faux-marble fresco on the foyer and staircase walls. In UNESCO-protected Chora, though, architectural preservation has for centuries been taken seriously — no matter how much money locals or expat arrivistes might have, they’re not permitted to move walls, tear through floors or enlarge and combine all the rooms. And so the house, which Athanasopoulou named Sekiari, still reflected the taste of its first owner, Zannis Sinetos Sekiaris, a Greek trader who conjoined three separate structures in 1799, then added details that are endemic to the island, like beige Patmian stone window frames and stamped terra-cotta floor tiles.

What Athanasopoulou could do was rearrange and redecorate the place from top to bottom, creating a more modern refuge that she felt dignified the island’s traditions. This is the fifth project that she’s finished on Patmos since she overhauled one of her family’s houses when she was 19, including a monastic three-bedroom hotel called Pagostas. Though she also works in Athens, where she has a home, and on a few other Aegean Islands, it’s in Chora in particular that she’s forged connections with makers and contractors, who have influenced her minimalist style, with its signature palette of pale greens and blues, rustic loomed textiles (usually dead stock) and vernacular craft techniques. Today, she says, “things are changing because many people are coming to the island, and everyone’s a bit overwhelmed. But I have close relationships, and I know how the locals work. It’s easy for me to communicate, so it’s more personal.”