Heritage: design-led hotels in historic buildings across the Mediterranean

The parquet was laid by people who never expected to be admired for it. Nobody here has tried to embalm the grand old house: a salvaged door is rethought as a headboard, a slow-running wall clock is left happily always late, a green velvet sofa sits against panelling a hundred years its senior, the two getting along like elderly gentlemen who vote differently and share a beer regardless. This is our edit for the lover of living history: design-led hotels in buildings of real pedigree, where heirloom pieces stay in plain use and the crafts are kept working rather than framed. You arrive into a lounge rather than a lobby, one that has welcomed strangers for centuries, in the spirit the Greeks call philoxenia, the hospitality owed to a guest. Nine houses make the edit, across Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Croatia, each a historic building still very much alive, and each first published in the launch issue of Unwaxed Lemons, our print magazine. If you would rather sleep inside a story than a show home, these are for you. We have gathered them here for anyone who travels for the patina of centuries.

What unites them is the refusal to mummify. In the marble-paved port of Hermoupolis on Syros, Aristide is a nine-suite hotel where neoclassical bones meet Art Deco theatre and the expected Cycladic whitewash has, deliberately, gone missing. Athens answers with Monsieur Didot, six suites behind a dusky pink façade in Kolonaki, named for the printer, publisher and philhellene Firmin Didot and wearing its love of letters lightly, down to the secret bookcase doors. And in San Sebastián, Villa Soro keeps an 1898 Tudor-style house built by Ramón Londaiz as a wedding gift, its name Eguzki Soro, sun field in Basque, now pairing Regency pomp with modern restraint and a Basque art collection.

A second group hands the keys to a family and a collector's eye. In Palma, the Soldevila Ferrer family have quietly curated an 1860 mansion into the Sant Francesc Hotel, named for the basilica across the square where Ramon Llull lies in alabaster, its rooms drawn by Lissoni, Citterio and Hayón. In Porto, B28 Apartments restores a five-storey bourgeois townhouse in the historical centre that was once an owner's grandmother's half-mythical territory, reached on long downtown walks and full of stories only she could tell. And in Milan, Crossing Manzoni shops its design the way the Milanese dress, with restraint, quotation and an unerring instinct for the right plinth.

The last group leaves the city for the deep countryside, where the pedigree is in the land as much as the house. In Emilia, Relais Roncolo 1888 is a 16th-century borgo of russet-red façades and Fontanelli pedigree, turned seventeen-suite country hotel in a balsamic-and-wine-rich postcode. On the Versilian heights of Tuscany, the fashion-industry veteran Riccardo Barsottelli has gathered a decade's worth of finds into Locanda al Colle, a single artful farmhouse on a hilltop. And on Croatia's Habsburg Riviera, in Lovran, the Eselböcks run Villa Valter, a sea captain's house reborn as a five-room hotel of theatrical Adriatic eccentricity, in a town the Habsburg leisure class built for its winters between 1880 and 1914.

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

Grand old houses that refuse to behave like museums. Nine of them: heirlooms in daily use, centuries of welcome, styles with a gorgeous air of age.