Founder Philosophy

From the beginning of time, we have sought places of refuge, recovery, and beauty.

The idea and philosophy of Avalon arise from that same ancient impulse — our shared longing for simplicity, for ground that restores us, for elements and textures that remind us we are truly alive.

Avalon is a 13th-century word meaning Island of Apples — a mystical paradise.

In the old texts:

And in Greek memory, it was one of the Fortunate Isles — shaded, musical, a place where heroes went not to escape life but to experience it more fully.

Today, Avalon is the name our family has chosen for a project about beauty and how humanity chooses to live.

Avalon is not a hospitality concept. It is a long, slow answer to a question our family has been asking for years: Where, and how, do we want to live our lives?

From that question comes a simple ambition: to create a small collection of places we would be proud to own forever — places shaped by lineage, loss, love, and a quiet faith in beauty.

1. Lineage & Memory

Avalon begins in stories, not spreadsheets.

A Greek grandfather leaving home in 1914 with almost no English and building a life from nothing.

A father whose first language was Greek, whose charisma filled rooms.

A son standing on the cliffs of Santorini in 1992, watching light break over the caldera and realizing his life would not be small.

These threads — migration, courage, beauty, risk — run straight into Avalon.

We are not interested in anonymous assets.
We are interested in places with memory in the walls.

2. A Family That Has Known Both Joy and Grief

Avalon is being built by a family that has experienced extraordinary joys and has also walked through the darkest day a marriage can endure — and stayed together.

We do not trade on that story publicly.
But it shapes everything quietly: our patience, our refusal to hurry, our reverence for time, and our belief that hospitality, at its best, is the care of the emotional lives of strangers as carefully as we care for our own.

We design for people who know life is fragile and beautiful — and want to live accordingly.

3. The Sharon Pillar — Perception, Light, Human Care

One of Avalon’s two co-founders, Dr. Sharon Theodore, is a retinal surgeon whose work lives at the intersection of light, vision, and the delicate machinery of human perception.

In her, the nine sisters of the old Avalon myths — guardians of healing, art, law, and harmony — have found their modern agent.

Her worldview quietly shapes ours:

• The way a place feels begins with the way it is seen.
• Light, texture, and visual harmony are not décor; they are part of wellbeing.
• Precision is a form of care.
• Privacy, dignity, and trust are non-negotiable.

From Sharon, Avalon inherits a simple belief:
Spaces should help people see life more clearly —
not distract them from it.

4. Beauty, Not Spectacle

We love beauty, but we are suspicious of spectacle.

Avalon favors:

• natural light over theatrics
• patina over perfection
• materials that age well
• architecture that listens to the land
• design that rewards a second, third, tenth visit

We would rather create a room that makes a guest exhale
than a lobby that photographs well and is forgotten.

5. Time & Stewardship

We are not building to flip.
We are building to steward.

Our preferred holding period is:
as long as it’s worthy of our children’s respect.

That means:

• buying slowly
• saying no often
• welcoming only a few assets into the fold
• investing in long-term comfort, not short-term trends
• working with operators who treat hospitality as a craft, not a revenue line

Avalon’s pace is deliberate.
We are comfortable being early, late, or small —
just not careless.

6. Guests as Protagonists

We don’t design hotels to show what we can do.
We design them to let guests feel more like themselves.

The best stays are never about us.
They’re about:

• parents rediscovering each other
• teenagers looking toward new horizons
• old friends finishing conversations that began decades ago
• people who work hard finally feeling their shoulders drop

Our job is to create the backdrop: light, quiet, warmth, and the sense that someone has thought about the details so they don’t have to.

7. What We Intend to Build

Over time, Avalon will become a small family of properties — European, coastal or near-coastal, often historic, always human in scale:

• 10–40 rooms, never anonymous
• in places where people have always gone to feel more alive
• with operators who bring soul, not just systems
• with an eye on yield and an ear tuned to the guest’s heartbeat

Each property should feel like this:
“If our children inherited this one day, we would be proud.”
That is our real investment thesis.

8. In One Sentence

If we had to say it simply:
Avalon is shaped by a surgeon’s eye and a storyteller’s soul —
a family building a handful of beautiful, long-term places that help people live, see, and feel more clearly.