The Aficionados, Issue 2

A wonderful world of stylish independent hotels, crafted design, architecture and travel culture – for those who love originality.

In this issue:

Across 148 full-colour pages, the magazine reads the southern landscape through a contemporary design lens, where light, material and restraint shape every decision. Every property is family-owned, independent, hand-curated, and chosen for its personality and soul. No two are alike, though all read as siblings sharing a single thread. What binds them is the creativity of the people behind them, playful, instinctive, innate; what sets them apart is the form it takes, read across five design registers that run from magpie maximalism to the unforced patina of the working countryside.

Southern style is not a trend but a temperament, and the Mediterranean explains itself at a glance. Here, architecture has never been imposed on the land so much as drawn out of it, the building rising from the same stone, lime and clay the landscape already held, calibrated over centuries against heat, drought and scarcity. Thick walls hold the cool of the night deep into the afternoon, lime-wash turns away the glare and the courtyard banks shade the way a cistern banks water. From the masseria and the finca to the convent and the whitewashed island house, this is a world of sun, stone and shade, pursued in the name of shelter rather than show. Beauty followed naturally.

This volume gathers 36 of the most distinctive stays across the Mediterranean and its Atlantic edge, from Greece, Italy, France, Portugal, Spain featuring popular destinations such as: Mallorca, Naxos, Tuscany, Sicily, Athens, San Sebastian, Alentejo to the Algarve via Lisbon and Porto.