Pappou Manoli grew up in Mytilinious, Samos.

In 1956, it was the place to be on Samos. There was an open air cinema, where Pappou Manoli forged his love for Spaghetti Westerns and riding out to the frontier. There were panigiris every weekend. The music was rebetiko, brought to the islands by refugees fleeing Asia minor. It did to traditional greek music what disco did to America in the 70s. It was a new, modern, vibrant sound and at age 15, Pappou Manoli was all over it.

Around the same time, his father, Pappou Kosta, undertook the project of building a kalivi. Kalivi isn’t a word you’ll hear across Greece. It's purely Samian, and it describes the small stone farmhouses people built to overnight in over the winter “kapno” harvesting season. Pappou Manoli and his family farmed kapno, tobacco. It was hard work and most years, they were forced to sell it for nothing; “tsamba” as the Greeks say - for free.

Pappou Manoli remembered these harder parts of island life, but he also told us the story of building the kalivi with pure joy.

His job was to carry the stones down the mountain, on his first donkey, Karambesto, a fat lazy mule. That’s him, and that’s Pappou Manoli, our real Greek cowboy.

Over the winter of 1956, Pappou Manoli and his father started putting together our Kalivi, stone by stone.

Blonde comes from this very kalivi. Each Sunday we’ll be introducing you to her. She’ll surprise you, make you laugh and invite you into the Good House. We can’t wait.

Whilst Manoli was tuning into Νέο Κημα (new wave) and watching Westerns in Samos, moulding himself into the cowboy he would soon become, a different world was unfolding in Athens in the 60s.

Loukia grew up surrounded by women. They were women with something to say. There was her own Yiayia, Sonia, who had fled Georgia in the 20s, glamorous, beautiful and always ready with a pithy aphorism. Her wit and wisdom has been passed down for generations. “A good day shows itself in the morning,” she would tell her daughter and granddaughters. She taught her family to keep their eyes wide open. No donkeys were getting past this bunch.

Her daughter, Yiayia Noula, was a consummate story teller - complete with ad breaks - and a talent for running up all the new fashions for her girls. Noula’s father would match these outfits with bespoke shoes for his granddaughters from his shoe factory. It was a house full of beautiful things - classical piano, Ancient Greek history, the lessons of the great philosophers of classical Athens, a well in the garden and of course, high fashion.

Noula’s husband had young cousins in America and they would ship suitcases packed with the latest fashions to the lucky recipients in Athens. In these leather trunks, longed for treasures from across the Atlantic would arrive - shorts, minis, and crucially, denim jeans. In 1961 Marilyn Monroe pulled on a pair of blue jeans whilst falling in love with an old-school cowboy played by Clarke Gable in the film Misfits. In the Athenian cinema, Yiayia Loukia would travel to Hollywood, Bollywood and closer to home watching Greece’s answer to Marylin - Aliki Vouyouklaki, the Greek blonde.

So when the teenage Yiayia Loukia unpacked her cousins’ American treasure trove she knew she would become the first girl in Athens to wear blue jeans.

She was under strict supervision from the adults in her life. She attended school at the foothill of Lycabettus mountain in Athens. When her father died unexpectedly, her uncle, the protective male figure in her life, would stand on the corner of the road that led down Lycabettus to keep an eye on his beautiful niece. He had to make sure no cowboys were lingering around.

And yet, fate had different plans. Like Marilyn in her blue jeans, a cowboy was pining for Yiayia Loukia. He was on Samos, preparing The Good House for her.