Levantes Boutique Hotel

One of the bedrooms at Levantes has its bed up on a plinth, with a post of driftwood at each corner and a white rope net slung between them where a canopy would usually be. The hotel calls its style Cycladic minimalism, white in every room with wood and stone from the landscape around it, and for once the label is simply accurate: whitewashed stone walls, and driftwood wherever a post is wanted. We found it all fresh, which is what white walls are for in the Cyclades in September.

There are 24 rooms, the grandest of them maisonettes with pools of their own. We had a Deluxe Double Room Sea View: 21 square metres inside and, outside, a small terrace over the bay, which is the reason to book it. Levantes is built on the hillside above Mylopotas, and that means steps. A lot of them. There is a family room with a sea view and a babysitting service, but we went as a couple, and on those steps we would say it is probably not one for children.

There is no restaurant. Mylopotas beach is under ten minutes down the hill on foot, and we preferred its local restaurants to eating at the hotel. Dinner is down the hill; the walk back is up it. Anything further takes wheels, and the hotel will arrange them: ten minutes to Chora for its whitewashed lanes and its nightlife, or half an hour across the island to Maganari for a quieter beach than the one below. On a day that gets no further than the terrace, massages and beauty treatments come to the room. Ios has no airport, so everyone arrives by ferry, and the hotel's transfer from the port, ten minutes away, is the first thing to book.

The hotel's one pool is an infinity pool curving along the edge of the terrace, with a timber deck built out into the water and two daybeds on it, and palms and a white pergola behind. The view from it is the one we remember: down the hillside over scattered white houses to the bay, and across the valley to a dry mountain with hardly a tree on it. Breakfast runs until eleven, and guests who review it mention the pastries. The bar is at the pool's edge, its stools lined up under a covered terrace. The cocktails were brilliant, the bar staff were good company, and the hotel, with some modesty, calls it a snack bar.