La Residencia, a Belmond Hotel in Mallorca
Belmond La Residencia
Wedged between the Mediterranean sea and the Tramuntana mountains, you’ll find the sun-baked little village of Deià. Once a hippie commune, it has been a refuge for artists and creatives for more than a century (think Joan Miró, Robert Graves, George Sheridan). Gradually, gentrification priced out the community who put it on the map. Locals who remember the 60s say, with heavy sighs, that the art scene is dead. It’s not. Because the management behind La Residencia, a Belmond Hotel owned by luxury powerhouse LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), has found new ways, and well-funded partners, to keep the legacy alive.
The ink on Belmond’s latest art partnership deal has barely had time to dry. La Residencia and the Loewe Foundation have joined forces to launch a highly selective artists-in-residency program drawn from competitors in the Loewe Craft Prize — one of the most influential cultural foundations in contemporary art, especially over the last decade. It’s an art-world flex for the hotel, and a point of pride for General Manager Thomas Moons.
A view from the artist’s studio at La Residencia
Jennifer Leigh Parker
“Historically, the Artists-in-Residencia program has existed since 2003. And we’ve done that with a few different partners. But this year, we collaborated with [The Loewe Foundation], which is great because it’s a Spanish brand,” says Moons, who also serves on the panel of judges who select the artists. “My perspective has shifted a little bit. Before I was looking for artists who can tell a story and engage with guests. And the art was obviously very important. But, now with Loewe, our ambition is to be more than just locally relevant, and to get to a world class level in everything we do. With two massive LVMH brands, we can’t afford to display something that is not up to par.”
This year, La Residencia winners are: Kaori Juzu from Japan, Deirdre McLoughlin from Ireland, and Dahye Jeong from South Korea. Essentially, these three artists will live at the hotel for two-months each, from May to October, with access to all the tools they need: a private studio, an on-site art gallery, and full freedom to create work “inspired by the local village of Deià.” For hoteliers, this means giving up the revenue of a standard guest room for six months per year (which range from €2,000–€4,000 euro per night in summer), and providing the artists with a modest grant. It’s an investment, for sure, and a smart one at a time when ‘sameness’ plagues a lot of branded hotels. Its often exclusive programming, such as access to private art tours, acclaimed chef dinners or meet-the-artist gallery events, that separate the good from the great.
Welcome to La Residencia
La Residencia
The Private Art Collection
Most luxury hotels showcase art as a signal of style, status and taste. La Residencia takes this much further than most. It’s a kind of magnet for artists, mainly because it houses a private art collection worth multi-millions and runs a public art gallery where painters and sculptors can showcase their work before an audience of collectors and the merely curious.
They’ve had decades of practice. When La Residencia opened as a hotel in 1984, the German owner Axel Ball wanted to bring some color into its walls. So, he asked his artist friends George and Cecilie Sheridan, an American-British who were working prolifically in Mallorca, to lend him a few paintings for what was then 15 rooms. They graciously obliged, but a challenge came when the rooms increased to 71. They needed more art. Today, more than 800 artworks by 80 artists adorn the walls both inside and out of what is one of the most beautiful hotels in the Balearic islands.
Most notably, the hotel has 33 original paintings by Joan Miró, plus one sculpture, La Téte, Bronze (1975). Miró had deep roots in Mallorca — his studio, the Fundació Miró Mallorca, is in Palma — and his connection to the island contributed significantly to its identity as a place where serious modern art could flourish. The artist, known for his fantastical visual language of lines, organic shapes and vibrant colors, is celebrated at the hotel’s main restaurant, Café Miró. Sit down, order a bowl of squid ink risotto with fresh caught calamari and seared scallops, and contemplate. If you look down at your dinner for too long, the light changes. The colors change. This sky is a canvas, framed by cypress, oak and pine, and it’s begging to be painted.
Paintings by Joan Miró are hung throughout the hotel
Jennifer Leigh Parker
Take the Walking Tour
To my mind, the coolest thing about the hotel is that Cecilie Sheridan still owns and curates the entire art collection, along with her daughter Amy Sheridan. They turned the property’s former olive mill into the Sa Tafona art gallery with rotating exhibitions. This seems fitting, as the Sheridans were the ones who established a relationship between artists and the hotel in the first place. Even now, as part of the curated programming, you can take a walking art tour with her daughter Tara Sheridan, who guides you through Deià where you will be introduced to local artists and their works. You’ll get to meet the new guard, working in situ. Specifically: Alan Hydes, a well known British painter with an exhibition now in Sa Tafona. Maria de Haan, the young ceramicist who just opened the chic new Dehaan Gallery Studio, which now offers bespoke ceramic and porcelain making workshops (a reason in-itself to visit this town). Gina Cubeles, an eccentric local artist whose striking abstract work is a meditation on earth’s climate from space. And Sunna Wathen, a prolific artist and a fixture in the Palma gallery scene.
Standing before his paintings in Sa Tafona gallery, Alan Hydes describes his home and studio above Cala Deià beach. “I come out in the morning and have a cup of coffee and look down there, and I have to pinch myself thinking it’s kind of paradise for a painter. I can’t believe I’ve managed to do everything I wanted to do; to come here and to settle where I can just create. I’m at a point now where I just like to be slightly out of my depth in terms of creativity. I could paint almond blossoms for the rest of my life, but I want to move forward creatively.”
We didn’t just visit these artists in their studios; they shared their work and perspectives, inspiring me not just to paint (for fun, and badly), but to think deeply about what it means to sustain a creative life in Mallorca.
Sunna Wathen, for example, is a force of nature. “Living in a big metropolitan city, you go to all the galleries, and you meet everybody, and that’s really important. But I feel that living here now, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. Because people come here; we just finished the big art fair, called the Art Cologne Palma. They invited 88 galleries, from New York, et cetera. But 15 were from Palma, and it’s just becoming a really big art scene. And I’ve got a studio in the middle of the old town. It’s brilliant.”
It doesn’t matter what she produces, but that she’s continually producing. She is a tall, Icelandic viking of a woman with long blonde tendrils and ice blue eyes. Herself, a work of art. She shows me her daily notebook; a list of all the elements and expressions she wants to remember to include in her paintings. There are stacks upon stacks of these, the detritus of creativity. Just seeing that, and her canary yellow Keds sneakers splashed with paint, changed me somehow… a tiny nudge that just might alter the course of things.
These artists know exactly who they are and what they want from life. Especially Sunna, surrounded by color and light — a kaleidoscope of her own making. “If we had no tourists on this island, there would be nothing here,” says Tara Sheridan, standing before a large-scale almond grove oil painting by Alan Hydes — which is, of course, for sale.
