For design
Menorca Experimental
Menorca · Balearic Islands
A nineteenth-century finca in the green middle of Menorca, taken on by the Paris group that made its name on cocktails and run now as something looser than a hotel, closer to an artist's house lent out for the season.
You reach it off the coast road, a few kilometres of drystone wall and pine, and then a working finca on thirty hectares with the old farm buildings kept and quietly added to. Dorothée Meilichzon handled the interiors, and her hand is everywhere without raising its voice: waxed concrete and rough local timber, curved plaster, a palette pulled down to the sand and olive of the island. Forty-three rooms, several with a small private pool, none of them straining to be grand. Ease is the whole idea. You come in off the day, cross a courtyard, and find the shutters already half closed against the heat.
The kitchen sits at the centre of things. Much of what reaches the table is grown on the land or bought from Menorcan farmers close by, cooked without fuss and eaten on the terrace under the pines, or inside the old house when the evening turns cool. It is Mediterranean food, plain in the best sense. The bar is what sets the place apart. Experimental started in Paris as a cocktail room, and that history shows in a list mixed with real care, the kind of drink you take before dinner and again long after. A twenty-six-metre pool runs beside the gardens for the hours in between.
Menorca has kept quieter than its neighbours, and it suits a hotel that does the same. This is a four-star agroturismo rather than a palace, and honest about it. The sea is a fifteen-minute walk down the Camí de Cavalls to the pebbles of Cala Llucalari, not laid at your door, and the finish is light on purpose. That restraint is the point. You are paying for the design, the table, the bar and the long green quiet of the island's interior, in a corner of the Mediterranean not yet worn smooth. Take a week, walk the coast path, and let the place set the pace.
