The building at Kriezotou 3 Street belonged entirely to the artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas and was donated to the Benaki Museum during his lifetime. The original structure, commissioned by Alexander Hadjikyriakos around 1932, comprised a ground floor and five upper floors. Designed by the architect Constantine Kitsikis, a professor of the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), it represented a typical example of interwar apartment block architecture.

In the mid-1950s, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas decided to live in the building, which belonged to his family, on a permanent basis. For this purpose a further storey was added, designed personally by Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas with the assistance of the architects Antonios Kitsikis and Alexander Papageorgiou, who had been his students at the Architectural School of the N.T.U.A. Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas' residence at Kriezotou 3 Street came to be well-known in architectural and artistic circles, and was depicted in Greek and foreign architectural reviews.

Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas lived on the fifth floor of the building, using the unusually spacious and well-lit space on the sixth floor as a studio and library. He lived and worked there continuously for almost forty years until his death in September 1994. After his death these spaces were preserved as they had been decorated and arranged during the artist's lifetime.

In 1991 the N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas Gallery began to operate in an area of 150 m2 on the fourth floor of the building. The permanent exhibition was organised by the artist himself, and comprises works representing all aspects of his creative activity. Temporary thematic displays of Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas' oeuvre are held in the gallery in order to show items not included in the permanent exhibition, such as drawings, small-scale sculptures, and works inspired by ancient Greek art.