Green Apartments in a concrete jungle

I first met artist, designer and furniture maker, Ioannis Zachariadis at a cafe near Psiri. A friend of mine insisted I meet him. "You will get on with him, you'll see," she kept saying. I was on holidays and had no appetite for work, but I did not want to disappoint her.

Ioannis Zachariadis had designed apartments in the centre of Athens, behind the old stadium, that had "to be seen to be believed" according to her. But I was in no mood for shifting with my wife and nine year-old son, especially as we had already settled in nice apartments. Nor was I in the mood for more art talk. Nevertheless, "What harm can a coffee do?" I thought.

As soon as I met Ioannis, I was disarmed. He is a slender, elegant man that has the enviable gift of a full set of hair, youthfulness and good looks. His English is exceptional and before I knew it, we were talking about life, art, politics, the economy, love, children (he's a father as well), Greece and so on. With little hesitation, I jumped on his motorbike and after a small heart attack while holding on to him for dear life while he sped through the congested streets of Athens, we made it to his Green Apartments. They were startling.

Right in the heart of the Athens, merely 100 metres from hectic Amalias Avenue, these apartments are like an oasis in the joyous pandemonium that is Athens. The apartments are set in a late 1940s low-rise apartment building, and they share a common green yard in the back, a luxury for central Athens. The front looks out to the pine forest of the Panathenaic stadium. Inside, the decor is a clean aesthetic reminiscent of a genteel middle class inner Athens of the 1940s. The tables are made by Ioannis, and the fittings are all bespoke.

The apartments are a seamless juxtaposition between period and modernity. "The apartments were my grandfather's, this is where he had his surgery," said Ioannis, as we sat in the sunken courtyard under a huge lemon tree, and drank gin and tonics. "It was in the 1940s, my grandfather was a gynaecologist and he would give poorer women lemons from his tree for vitamin C. He also had a goat for fresh milk, for the mother's calcium or babies if the mother could not produce milk," he added.

I was becoming gently inebriated on the gin and tonics as the shade of the lemon tree cooled us in the Athens summer. Outside the city must have roared as it usually does, yet inside Ioannis' courtyard we could have been in a town or village far away from Athens.

Yet, we were walking distance from Zeus' Columns, and the Botanical Gardens and a step away from some of Athens' best taverns and bars. Importantly, the tables that grace Ioannis' Green Apartments are sublime pieces. Ioannis melds marble, rose wood and steel creating exceptional art which references antiques but is wholly contemporary.

"There are always two or three elements that I bring together to make one. Marble is cold, wood is warm, the sharper the contrast the more sensational the outcome," explains Ioannis. I asked, "Why do you focus on these incredible sculptured tables and not sculpture?" "There is something important about tables, they are a canvas for me," he said. "A table is the heart of the house, it is where people eat, fall in love, meet, break up, work, discuss matters of importance," he added. "Tables are also centre of any institution be it a bank, an office, even a church,"