Contemporary: design-led modern hotels across the Mediterranean

A staircase rises in a single sculpted curve of pale plaster, its handrail one dark line drawn as if in a held breath. This is our edit for anyone who reads luxury in restraint: design-led houses that belong, without apology, to now. Metal sits easily against chalked plaster here, hard line and soft mass in fusion; a courtyard offers white walls, two potted citrus and the evening light, the better for being almost empty. These are buildings that have read about the past and admire it, but decline to dress up as it. Their argument is materia e luce, material and light, carried by subtle texture rather than bold statement, and it is never a cold one: this is a warm intelligence that happens to speak in straight lines rather than ornament. If straight lines and the play of light are your idea of luxury, these are for you: seven houses across Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Italy, each first published in the launch issue of Unwaxed Lemons, our print magazine. We have gathered them here for anyone drawn to the modern at its most considered, and least shouty.

What unites them is a deference to their setting. TATOÏ Club sits on twenty hectares of pine forest in the foothills of Mount Parnitha, twenty-odd minutes north of central Athens, and gives almost nothing away from the road: a long white wall, single storey, deliberately uninformative. Elli Vizantiou founded it in 2012, having found nothing among the world's members' clubs that did quite what she wanted, and the architect Stelios Kois with landscape architect Helli Pangalou have turned the grounds into a working answer to an unfashionably old question about how to live and think well. The same refusal to impose governs AHÃMA on the Turkish Riviera, where thirty cabanas and twenty-nine suites are threaded through a protected coastal forest on Fethiye's Günlüklü Bay with not a single tree felled, the architecture answering the landscape rather than overruling it. And in Sicily, ADLER Sicilia carries the instinct to scale: the seventh-generation Sanoner family, hoteliers since a forebear opened the first family inn in the Dolomites, have set their first southern project on thirteen hectares above the Agrigento coast, at the edge of the WWF-protected Torre Salsa reserve.

Others take the local vernacular and quietly modernise it. In the cork-oak country of Portugal's Alentejo, L'AND Vineyards is an 18th-century Sousa Cunhal wine estate where the Lisbon practice Promontório has reimagined the region's whitewashed rural building as a small settlement of clustered villas and townhouses, the central prism's sheared corners following the land's natural contours, with Chef Miguel Laffan's Michelin-starred MAPA folded in. On Mallorca, Can Ferrereta does something kindred with older stone: a 17th-century mansion of golden marès beside the medieval Porta Murada in Santanyí's old town, held for centuries by the Bonet family, whose nickname los Ferrereta became first the building's and then the street's, now edited by the Soldevila Ferrer family into a hotel of unhurried calm, the sea within half an hour.

And then the two that turn the register urban. Behind a steel-plated, easily-missed entrance in central Lisbon, Pátio do Tijolo pairs Japanese-inflected restraint with Portuguese craft over three floors, designed by Carina Seelig of Base Geométrica with the Tubella siblings, Juan and Natalia, who have honoured the long Iberian pausa before evening with open-plan rooms and low mid-century furniture, Hans Wegner tables among the design-history quotations, the Tagus and the orange Ponte 25 de Abril framed beyond. North along the coast, Hotel Arbaso takes its name from the Euskara word for ancestor and builds itself around the traditions, topography and craftsmanship of the Basque Country, occupying a 19th-century neoclassical building in the centre of San Sebastián. Restraint, in both, that never reads as cold, the warm intelligence the whole edit speaks in.

Each of these houses features in full in the launch issue of Unwaxed Lemons, our print magazine.

From a club hidden in a Greek pine forest to a Mallorcan mansion of marès stone, an Alentejo wine estate to cabanas threaded through Turkish forest with no tree felled: seven houses that have read the past, admire it, but decline to dress up as it.

A pitched cedar-clad guest pavilion at AHÃMA, Muğla, its sliding glass wall opening to twin armchairs on a stone terrace under a timber-framed gable.

A timber-framed guest room at AHÃMA on Turkey's Günlüklü Bay, sliding doors opening to a garden and a glimpse of the sea beyond.