GRAND HOTEL SON NET MALLORCA

With a lifetime's worth of heirlooms, this hotel elevates Mallorcan hospitality

- Toby Skinner

Past the thick pineapple print curtains at the Maria de Napoles suite at the new Grand Hotel Son Net, a Mallorcan black vulture scans silently over the racing green poolside awnings, the pointy Italian cypress trees and the neat lines of Malvasia grapes that tumble down from the hotel. It's soon gliding over Puigpunyent, the sleepy stone town cradled by the Tramuntana Mountains. But in the suite-where some of the free-form frescoes date back to the mid-17th century, and even the black marble bathroom has its own upholstered seating area-there remains a mirage-like quality to the outside world.

Barely a week after reopening, Son Net already has a timeless feel; a sense of existing in an alternate space of densely layered texture and history. A baroque estate built for the Net family in 1672, it was first turned into a hotel in 1998 by the American real estate mogul David Stein, who had lived here, restoring the building's pinkish, vine-strewn terracotta facade and classical Mediterranean gardens. But the old Son Net's generically velveteen interiors and splashy 20th-century art had dated, and it has been reborn after an almost three-year makeover under a new owner: Javier López Granados, the art collector and creator of Finca Cortesin, the much-loved resort on the Andalusian coast west of Marbella. As a Cortesin hotel, López Granados handed the creative reins to Madrid-based art historian, antiques collector, and interior designer Lorenzo Castillo.