At home in Majorca's Cap Vermell Estate

Majorca’s tourist authorities may promise 230 days of sunshine a year, but even so, the Balearics are not always a reliable source of winter sun. Anyone who has read George Sand’s memoir of the months she and Chopin spent on the island in 1838 (“As winter advanced, the gloom froze all my attempts at gaiety and calm”) or indeed listened attentively to the composer’s Prelude in D flat major Op 28, known as the Raindrop, with its underlying ostinato inspired by the sound of rain on a roof, will be aware of that already.

But this has not deterred Hyatt from determining to keep its forthcomingPark Hyatt Mallorca Resort – its first in Europe – open year-round. (For the moment you’ll find Park Hyatt Resorts only in rather balmier Goa, the Maldives and Carlsbad, southern California, plus a ski hotel in Beavercreek, Colorado.)

Designed to look like a traditional village of terracotta-roofed stone houses with a little plaza with a restaurant, café and tapas bar at its heart, the 158-key hotel is set within the 61-acre Cap Vermell Estate, a new development of villas and a country club (with tennis courts and indoor and outdoor pools) within 10 miles of four golf courses, in the Canyamel valley on the east coast of the island. There’s also a private beach club, five minutes by car from the hotel, but the resort itself is not on the coast. To compensate, though, there are three pools of its own (two of them heated), one of them fed by a cascade. While other attributes include a restaurant contrived to look like a private villa in which a succession of guest chefs from across Asia will cook. (Its British general manager, John Beveridge, formerly of the Grand Hyatt Dubai, was once chef to the Sultan of Brunei.)

Park Hyatt Mallorca is due to open this spring (its rates are yet to be published). In the meantime, however, the first of a dozen new villas on the estate is now available to rent. Villa Ruby (sleeps eight, though one bedroom is a single), as it is named, has been designed to look, from outside, like a traditional farmhouse, with a shallow pitched tiled roof, walls of irregular rough-hewn pale stone and wooden shutters.

Inside, the look is more obviously luxe: acres of polished travertine and chaise-longues that owe a debt to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona series (a neat nod to the fact that Catalan is the lingua franca here), though the overall look is not obviously Modernist. It’s reassuring to note too that there are wood-burning stoves, double-glazing and central heating for inclement winter weather. (As well as air-conditioning for the summer months, of course.)

Resource: http://www.telegraph.co.uk