Piecing together small, often forgettable jobs is a rite of passage for a young architect. In the summer of 2013, Argyro Pouliovali, 26 and pregnant with her first child, designed an information hub for an upstart Athens art fair in her native Greece. A year later, she was finishing a cheap and cheerful renovation of a beachfront hotel her husband had bought on Antiparos while staying with him and their infant son on the Cycladic island. “Actually, it was the opposite—how to just refresh a place without showing that somebody had touched it. I know it was a very Cycladic cliché, but it’s a lovely one so you don’t want to spoil it.”

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