Most hotels that describe themselves as colourful mean the cushions. Riviera means the building: the stripe runs through the façade, the awnings, the parasols, the loungers and the pool tiles, and there is very little left over that isn’t striped.

Fourteen rooms in Ciutadella, on the quieter western end of Menorca, arranged around a courtyard pool the hotel calls the oasis at its heart — which in a property this small is not marketing so much as a floor plan. It is a restored seaside building given over to one committed idea, and the discipline is what makes it work. A single stripe applied to a lobby wall is a decorating choice. A stripe carried down into the pool tiling, so the water reads as rippling fabric the moment anyone swims through it, is an argument.

The palette sits in marmalade and sorbet territory — orange, cream, mustard, a soft blue — and the shapes answer it, with curves wherever a corner would normally be. The reference the hotel reaches for is the Mediterranean 1960s, and unusually for that claim it does not mean beige minimalism with one rattan chair; it means saturated colour and a scalloped parasol edge. Wallpaper*, which surfaced it, reports it as the former Hotel Madrid, a plain local place reopened around the pool. There is a pool bar that does brunch and a rooftop for the evening.

Two honest caveats. Fourteen rooms means it will be full, and the site’s own gallery is almost entirely mood photography — a parasol shot from underneath, a swimmer, a branded bottle poured over someone’s knees — so you can book a room here without having seen one. No architect or design studio is credited anywhere on the hotel’s site either, which for a building this art-directed is a strange omission.

Neither changes what it is. This is a small hotel that picked a motif and refused to get bored of it, and that refusal is visible from the first photograph.