Design-Led

43 islands worth the journey for their architecture as much as their water. The register applies a narrow test: the building has an author, the author's decisions are visible, and removing them would leave a different property.

The range is wider than the phrase suggests. Mirrored steel spheres floated into place at Shebara; Kengo Kuma's curves at Ummahat; a 1929 Art Deco hotel kept intact at Burgh Island; an Austro-Hungarian sea fort converted whole at Mamula. The last two are architecture the property inherited rather than commissioned, and the record says which.

Design carries a cost that brochures omit and the register records: unconventional buildings are hot, or dark, or hard to maintain in salt air, and several of these have been rebuilt once already for exactly that reason.

Not for travellers who want a room to disappear behind the view. On these islands the building insists on being noticed, which is the point and sometimes the problem.