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Our new summer magazine gathers thirty-six family-run design hotels and boutique guesthouses across the Mediterranean & Co, from Greece and Spain to Mallorca, Tuscany and Portugal. Here is why we put it on paper.
There are places where the sun is an occasional guest, and places where it presides. Across southern Europe the heat sits heavy on the stone for half the year, and the people have done the only sensible thing in the face of forty-degree afternoons: they have redrawn the clock. The day starts at first light, pauses through the worst of the glare and resumes in the long hum of the evening, when the squares refill and a grandfather settles in to nurse a measure of Naxian kitron as though guarding a state secret. Slowness, here, is not idleness but architecture.
That is the territory our new magazine sets out to chart, and it is also, by no accident, an argument for paper.
Unwaxed Lemons began on the back of a napkin in a Lisbon tasca, which felt at the time like the only reasonable place to start a project about the slow south. Properly speaking the Mediterranean is a single inland sea, though its sensibility has always leaked beyond the basin, north into the Tuscan interior and west onto the Atlantic edges of Iberia, from Porto down through Lisbon and the Alentejo, wherever the climate permits a long lunch and an even longer afternoon.
A screen refreshes, forgets and moves on. A magazine does none of those things. It has a weight in the hand, a chosen paper with a grain you can feel under the thumb, and it ages on a shelf rather than dissolving into a feed. We printed it in Austria on FSC-certified stock, set it in Recife Text, Central Avenue and Maison Neue Mono, and ran it as a limited edition with no reprint. Once it sells through, it is gone, which is rather the point of a collectable object in a world built to scroll.
Across 148 full-colour pages, Unwaxed Lemons gathers thirty-six family-owned hotels across seven countries. No two are alike, yet all read as siblings sharing a single thread, independents run by founders who answer their own emails, chosen for personality and soul. What binds them is a design language fluent in nature and obsessed with the elemental: material honesty above all, from unbaked clay and Mallorcan marès to Pugliese chianca, Etna tufo and sun-bleached limewash, a palette mixed straight from the surrounding earth.
In Greece, the edition runs from the Cycladic geometry of Naxos and the quiet of Crete to the islands of Syros and Santorini, and into Athens, where a holistic club and a six-suite townhouse in Kolonaki keep company. In Spain, it reaches the boutique hotels of Mallorca, the Belle Epoque grace of San Sebastian and the white shores of Formentera, with an outlier in the Matarranya. Italy threads through Puglia, Sicily and a clutch of Tuscan restorations, by way of Venice, Rome and Milan, while Portugal carries us from the Alentejo to Porto via Lisbon and the Algarve. France adds a single address in Gascony, and a Turkish coast and an Adriatic shore round out the seven.
Look closely and the architecture of the south turns out to be a long argument with the sun. Stucco exteriors, red-clay tile roofs and arched apertures are not merely decorative, they are calibrated responses to the heat, designed to invite the breeze while softening the glare. The shutter angled against noon, the cooling patio, the loggia catching the late air, the courtyard that dissolves the line between inside and out: these are the everyday inventions of a porous way of living. Italian Liberty, Catalan Modernisme, Jugendstil and Belle Epoque Donostia turn out to be so many dialects of one elemental grammar, where design, and the art it hangs alongside, is not decoration but a dialogue between past and present, texture and temperature, culture and climate.
These are not lifestyles to be consumed but ways of arranging a day. They ask us to slow down and to savour the details, which is, in the end, the same thing a printed magazine asks of you. We did the hunting; the rest is yours to read slowly.
148 PAGES · 36 HOTELS · 7 COUNTRIES · FULL COLOUR · LIMITED EDITION, NO REPRINT
Unwaxed Lemons is on sale July 2026 at theaficionados.com and select newsstands. Visit the store →
What is Unwaxed Lemons?
Unwaxed Lemons is a print magazine from The Aficionados covering hotels, architecture and the culture of travel. It curates thirty-six family-run, design-led independents across the Mediterranean and its Atlantic edge.
How many hotels, and which countries?
Thirty-six hotels across seven countries: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece, with a Turkish and an Adriatic outlier in Turkey and Croatia.
Is it a hotel guide?
No. It is a design and architecture magazine rather than a listings guide. Every property is a family-owned independent, chosen for personality, craft and design, and framed first through the people behind it.
Are there design hotels in Greece, Spain and Mallorca?
Yes. The edition features design hotels across the Greek islands, including Naxos, Crete, Syros, Santorini and Athens, and across Spain, including Mallorca, San Sebastian and Formentera, alongside Italy, Portugal and France.
Where can I buy it?
Unwaxed Lemons goes on sale in July 2026 through the store at theaficionados.com and at select newsstands. It is a limited edition with no reprint.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.