The ground the mansion stands on was once a garden of the Royal Palace next door. In 1912, a wealthy shipowner from the island of Chios, Alexandros Michalinos, began building a villa there. He did not live to see it finished. The unfinished house then passed through a tangle of ownership worthy of a shipping ledger: in 1916 Michalinos's widow, Irene Manoussis, having married the banker and politician Dimitrios Maximos, sold the incomplete building to another shipowner, Leonidas Embirikos - only to buy it back in 1921. It was Maximos who at last completed the house and moved his family in during the early 1920s, and it is his name the building still carries.

The mansion's quietest rooms have held some of the century's hardest history. Between 1941 and 1944, during the Axis occupation of Greece, the building served as the residence of the German Admiral of the Aegean Sea - a foreign command post in the heart of an occupied capital. When the war ended, the house briefly housed the United States ambassador in Athens. In 1952, Dimitrios Maximos sold it to the Greek state at a favorable price, and for the next three decades it became the country's most elegant guest house, receiving foreign dignitaries. Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia stayed here in 1955; Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom in 1980.

In 1982, the prime minister Andreas Papandreou decided to move his office out of the Parliament building and into the mansion, giving the Greek premiership a home of its own for the first time. The irony is that Papandreou rarely used it. He preferred to govern from his family villa at Kastri in the wealthy northern suburbs, or from the seaside at Lagonisi where he spent his summers. The grand gesture of a dedicated prime ministerial residence was made, and then largely sidestepped, by the very man who made it - a small, very Greek comedy of intention and habit.

Today the mansion's great advantage is also a problem. It sits at the heart of Athens, moments from the Hellenic Parliament, beside the Presidential Mansion and the National Garden - location no architect could improve on. But the building itself is simply too small for a modern head of government and the apparatus that travels with one. Since the late 2000s, officials have repeatedly studied moving the office elsewhere, with the grand Zappeion Palace floated as the leading candidate. For now, though, the country is still run from the shipowner's villa, a reminder that power in Greece often prefers the intimate and the inherited over the purpose-built and the new.