One person’s luxury is another’s outrageous excess. One’s necessity another's luxury. Some save for years to book a five-star hotel for a special occasion. Others treat them as standard. You can spend a fortune to be disappointed, or find that a modest place with personalised service is actually more luxurious than famous brands. Luxury is tough to define and tricky to deliver.
Two weeks ensconced at the five-star Domes of Elounda firmed up five of my own opinions about luxury:
- Great design and beautiful surroundings are the “table stakes” in this game, but it’s small touches and personal interaction that provide the winning hand.
- Luxury resorts are perfect for the exhausted seeking a revival of body and soul, but do put you at a distance from the local experience … and edge into a waste of money if you’re going to spend much time away from them. (We didn't, extracting full value from our investment.)
- From what we saw of the hotel-filled coastline from Heraklion east, the immediate environ of Domes is the only place I’d want to holiday in Crete.
- Given the hours they work and the range of challenges they face, the jobs of customer-facing staff at places like Domes of Elounda make my work look easy.
- When you love the sun but your husband is practically allergic to it, a suite with its own sun lounging area and plunge pool may be edging towards necessity.
I have rarely occupied a more spectacular living space in a hotel, and our suite will go down in memory as the highlight of our stay at Domes. Modern, airy, and almost Scandinavian in its clean lines, it featured a large, high-ceilinged sitting room adjoining a bedroom with an enormous bed dressed superbly (Domes is part of the Marriott family and the brand’s famous pillows are always a delight). Off that was a bathroom with separate shower and toilet rooms, a bathtub and a double sink so big you could have put a toddler to bed in it. The floor was cool grey stone, the fixtures and fittings sleek crome or chocolate-coloured wood. Both rooms had large televisions that … in anticipation of what I suspect will be the future … didn’t actually have a content feed. It’s assumed you come with your own devices and will cast whatever you want to watch onto the screens via the hotel’s high-speed broadband and an app you download. (Such fiddling fell outside of the total relaxation remit for the trip and I was feeling stubborn about paying for an app I wouldn’t use again, so we left the TVs blank and watched the iPad.)
The spectacle, however, comes from what’s outside. Three long rows of suites march across the top of the hill occupied by Elounda, built from local stone so that their grey, rust and charcoal almost fades into the landscape. The simple cubist architecture mimics fishing huts in the town of Plaka below, but those clean lines, sharp angles and prominent lintels would make an ancient Minoan feel right at home. Both sitting- and bedroom had glass walls opening onto a patio running the length of the suite, and then a long pool stretching along the border of that. Immediately beyond, a bank of local flowers (newly-planted, but destined to be lushly beautiful) sloped down to the row of suites below before the spectacular panorama of Mirabello Bay stretching towards Elounda and Agios Nikolaos. Mountains reared up sharply to the right and formed a misty horizon line to the left. We could enjoy the view from two outdoor loungers with cushions as thick as bed mattresses, or a table that sat four beneath a canopy of wooden slats casting dappled shade.
Curiously, an outdoor kitchen ran down one side of the patio. Curious because there’s no cookware or utensils, so not really anything you can do with it. The pool was long enough to do a bit of swimming, with shallow entry steps that also make a comfortable seat for semi-submerged reading. Being locked down here for months wouldn’t have been an effort, and we spent a lot of time in our cozy eyrie.
There was plenty within the resort to tempt us out, however.
On the north side of the suites, the hill fell away towards the main reception area, featuring a buffet restaurant, bar, spa, the adult pool and the path to the beach. Everything here is designed to take in the spectacular view of the island of Spinalonga with its Venetian fort and ruins across the water.
The adult pool is an enormous oval, little populated when we were there and enormously quiet.
The beach below is one of the highlights of the resort and, I suspect from what I could see of others, is one of the best in Crete. You hike down quite a steep path, over-run with bougainvillea and other flowering tropical bushes, cross under the main road and come out on a long beach, divided into distinct terraces and thickly planted with olives and greek pines. While there are patios and decks jutting over the water that offer full sun, there are more options for dappled or full shade ... by far the better choice under the intense Greek sun. The sand here is paler and finer than the compacted, mud-like stuff we saw on many of the other beaches on our excursion day to Knossos, and the swimming area protected by buoys is enormous. You can swim about 100 metres out into the bay and perhaps 200 up and down the beach.
The water isn't quite Caribbean or Maldivian, but there's plenty of variation from deepest cobalt to glittering turquoise and it's a comfortable swimming temperature, particularly in the shallows. Because you're in a such a sheltered area, with other islands forming a massive breakwater against the main Cretan Sea, the water can be calm as a lake, with almost no waves. The only adverse conditions we experienced were in the second week, when strong autumn winds blew up a vigorous chop on the water's surface. The beach has a bar at its centre, a gift shop for beachwear and one of the hotel's a la carte restaurants at its southern edge. To the north, it's overlooked by a picturesque little domed church, while Spinalonga dominates the view across the water. And, of course, it's all ringed with the ubiquitous mountains.
The bulk of Domes' hotel rooms cling to the side of the hill between the reception centre and the suites at the hill crest, arranged in clusters of buildings and traversed by a winding stone path. The design here switches from Minoan cubist to a more exotic Arabic vibe with domes, narrow windows and fretwork screens, all painted a uniform dark coral and lushly landscaped. The hilltop suites may draw their architecture from the vernacular, but this part of the resort looks more exotic ... like a stage set for the Voyages of Sinbad.
The other side of the hill, falling south from the suites, features parkland, an outdoor gym, tennis courts, the kids' and teenagers' clubs and a plateau housing "The Core". This area is the resort's internal village high street, with free-standing shops along a promenade leading to a square surrounded by food trucks. This may sound quite rustic but the shop buildings are high-design concepts in glass and geometry, the merchandise is more art gallery gift shop than beachfront souvenirs and the music played when the food trucks are serving leans to 21st century clubbing rather than Zorba the Greek. There's also a fun outdoor gallery here where a modern artist has re-imagined the monsters of Greek mythology. The Core space had a lot of potential but seemed fairly new and without an established identity yet. The food trucks only serve two nights a week and the shops are only open when the trucks serve, so most of the time this whole area is empty.
Just below is the enormous family pool, a football pitch -length strip of water crossed by four high, arching bridges, feeling a bit like a Venetian canal. (But one that's pristinely clean and available for swimming.) Pergolas on either side offer dappled shade, with a bar on one side and a restaurant on the other. While the adult pool only featured about 10 pairs of lounges, this enormous pool deck has scores of them. The "family" designation meant that this pool was louder than the others; our preferred September holiday time eliminates school-age children but Domes was awash with toddlers. But the family pool wasn't as bad as I'd feared. It's so big you're likely to be able to find a quiet patch, even if a pack of little people is staging pirate battles at one end. One drawback: this pool closes at 6pm so swimmers won't disturb the poolside restaurant. (The adult pool closes early, too.) Though that's great for dining, I did think it was a shame there were no possibilities for a moonlight dip. Unless, of course, you had your own private plunge pool...
We had unlimited access to the "Haut Living Room", a lounge next to the family pool. It features a concierge desk staffed with an enthusiastic and cheerful team who feel more like friends than staff by the end of a two-week visit. Coffee, soft drinks, beer and wine are available all day, while a full bar makes an appearance at 6pm. A small buffet of savouries and desserts is available throughout the afternoon, switching to cheese plates, olives and nuts at 6pm. While we still added a healthy amount to our bill with a bottle of wine each night with dinner, this set-up meant we could manage other drinks costs by confining them to cocktail hour in the lounge each night. We rarely hit the buffet during the day, given our preference for quieter pool areas and the fact that we rarely ate breakfast before 10:30.
Our package included breakfast ... buffet style in one of two restaurants ... and dinner in one of three. (With the addition of the food trucks as options two nights a week, once for Greek street food and once for burgers.) After trying all three restaurants, we started alternating between the two a la carte places. While the buffet was tasty and changed key dishes nightly, it lacked the atmosphere of the other two, was far more attractive to the toddler brigade (thus much louder), and came with the inevitable dangers of eating far too much.
My husband and I were split on our favourite from there. Always a sucker for views and seashores, my pick was Topos, the open-aired restaurant at the south end of the beach. If you request far enough in advance, you can get one of the tables on the pier, enjoying the exceptional panorama of the bay at night, the mountains across the water and the cheerful conviviality of the restaurant itself. Dining here under a full moon was one of the highlights of my stay.
There's a mix of live entertainment here which can actually be a bit distracting if you're under the restaurant's roof; another reason we preferred the pier. (The night with traditional Cretan music was fantastic. The one with Greek pop/club tunes mixed by a DJ significantly decreased our enjoyment of that evening, particularly because we were between the DJ and the kitchen in maximum volume range.) Topos felt a bit more "local" with a fantastic variety of Greek starters ... one night we went double on these and skipped mains completely ... and fresh seafood.
Blend, next to the family pool and the Haut Living Room, won my husband's vote. The views are fabulous here, too (nowhere in the resort suffers on that front), but the modern surroundings and the sleek restaurant design aren't quite as quiet and romantic as the beachside restaurant. The menu here is, like the architecture, a bit more modern and cosmopolitan: an upscale grill focusing on excellent cuts of meat and a bit of fish. I was surprised ... and, in these days of concern about climate change, concerned ... about how far the meat had travelled. English pork, American beef, New Zealand lamb. Casting your eyes to the dry landscape with its scrubby vegetation, it's easy to imagine the locally sourced options for meat are sparse. I will confess, with guilt, that those American steaks were tasty.
Dishes in both restaurants were beautifully presented and cooked with care. In two weeks we tried most of the items on both menus and only hit a few things we'd dismiss as average. The pork belly should have stayed in England, where they understand how to render that fat and crisp the crackling. Food was at its best when it edged into the local: grilled sea bass, anything with aubergines, tzatziki and hummus, calamari. We particularly enjoyed sampling local Greek wines, expertly guided by the manager of Blend and our regular waiter at Topos. They, plus the concierge team at the Haut Living Room, will be amongst our fondest memories of the place.
One slight frustration with the meal plan was the amount of surcharges. If you wanted the nicer cuts at Blend, you paid an additional fee. Same with the array of fresh fish of the day at Topos. And these fees, I suspect, added up to a meal much pricier than the local restaurants. You were welcomed to shift your dinner credit (€50) to lunch and go out for the evening, but if you weren't having your generous breakfast until 10:30 that was just too much food.
Domes of Elounda was exactly what we needed this holiday. We were exhausted. It revived us. If I wanted to do more sightseeing, or get a more local experience, this might not have been the best option. If, like us, you don't have any children you'll want to consider booking very carefully. With both kids' and teenagers' clubs, plus multiple pools and food all within its boundaries, this is an excellent choice for families. Which means those seeking peace and quiet should avoid school holidays at all costs. And even outside of those holidays, should consider the suites with the private pools for perfect calm.
The older I get, the more "peace and quiet" factors in to my definition of luxury. At Domes of Elounda, sitting beside my private pool hearing nothing but the Cretan wind whistle around the buildings, I found that in abundance.
