Eclectics: design-led maximalist hotels across the Mediterranean

A primary-coloured light hangs over the table like a child's drawing; beside it, a red-patterned sofa conducts a cheerful argument with a wicker chair, and neither is losing. This is our edit for the magpie-eyed: design-led hotels assembled by people with real charisma and an unapologetic flair for drama, where nothing matches on purpose and the sum, somehow, is harmony. The governing principle is sprezzatura, the studied ease that takes enormous trouble to look like none at all. Six houses make the edit, across Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, each the singular vision of an owner or architect who trusted their own eye over any rulebook, and each first published in the launch issue of Unwaxed Lemons, our print magazine. We have gathered them here for anyone who reads a room the way others read a wardrobe, and likes it loud.

What unites them is a refusal to behave. Take Venice M'Art, where the founders of the cult label Golden Goose have moved into Ca' da Mosto, one of the oldest palazzi on the Grand Canal, and built something the city has never quite seen: part hotel, part restaurant, part 1950s alimentari gleefully reborn as a concept store. The argument begins in the shop, set into the sotoportego that once carried Rialto's market trade, and runs up through rooms that are Post-Venetian and proudly anti-postcard, pattern colliding with pattern, the famous Venetian palette reworked rather than reproduced. It is maximalism with a wink, a love letter to a city that refuses the costume.

The same instinct, scaled down and turned domestic, runs through La Bandita Townhouse. John Voigtmann spent enough of his career on the loud side of the recording-studio glass to know exactly what he wanted from the quiet one, and he found it in Pienza, Rossellino's Renaissance jewel of a town, where he turned a former convent into a hotel with no sign at the door. Inside, monastic calm meets a record-collector's eye, bold contemporary art set against mid-century pieces with a confidence that never tips into noise. It is the rare hotel that feels like staying in the home of someone with impeccable, slightly unpredictable taste, and that domesticity is the thread that leads to Casa Fortunato, a gorgeous 100-year-old townhouse in the sleepy Portuguese port-town of Alcácer do Sal. Restored and run by the architect couple António Falcão Costa Lopes and Filipa Fortunato, it is filled with their own collected things rather than a decorator's scheme: colour used fearlessly, art and antiques in cheerful conversation, the family's eye visible in every room.

If those two prize warmth, others prize nerve. On the dunes of Formentera's Migjorn coast, architects Víctor Agudo and Óscar Romero have carved Hannah from curving sand-coloured plaster, its balconies cut in deep sweeping arcs that read as a continuation of the coastal rock, until the tiger-print rebellions inside break the calm and remind you nobody here is being earnest. Rome answers in kind at Crossing Condotti, an 18th-century palazzo a biscotto's throw from the Spanish Steps that wears its couture neighbours' confidence without matching their volume: a jewel-box of just a handful of rooms, each dressed with deliberate chromatic flair. And then, for the quietest drama of all, Éros Kéros, four cubic Cycladic houses on Koufonisia named for the prehistoric island across the bay where the Cycladic figurines were gathered and laid to rest. Its interiors are the work of owner Anita Papantoniou, who travelled and read her way into her own vocabulary before bringing it home, pairing island restraint with collected colour for slow days of salt-flecked repose. Eclectic in the truest sense: personal, well-read and entirely unbothered by what anyone else is doing.

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

For the magpies among us. Six gloriously overstuffed houses where nothing matches on purpose, everything's a bit theatrical and somehow the whole lot sings. Bravo.

A colour-led sitting room at Casa Fortunato, Alentejo, with a lilac sofa, lime-green chairs and a row of framed drawings above a magenta rug.

A curving whitewashed terrace at Hannah, Formentera, with a rope shade and a built-in banquette dressed in bold blue, red and yellow striped cushions.

A tall Gothic window framing a Grand Canal view in a guest room at Venice M'Art, Venice, with sheer curtains, a cushioned window seat and a sheepskin-draped chair.