In the 1930s Pärnu's city architect Olev Siinmaa rebuilt Estonia's cure-town beachfront in white render: the Rannahotell of 1937, the beach salon, the mud baths, his own villa. The buildings read as ships beached in the sand — railed balconies, one curved corner, ribbon glazing, an occasional round window.

Nothing on them is decoration. The whole vocabulary is sun, air and a horizontal line, held between the dark pine wall behind and the grey-gold sand in front. This system keeps that discipline: wide low layouts, thin metal rules, and large fields of untouched render doing the work that ornament would do elsewhere.