Menorca Experimental

Menorca Experimental

Twenty minutes from Mahón airport, on the quieter southern flank of the island between Alaior and Son Bou, Menorca Experimental occupies a nineteenth-century finca set across 30 hectares of pine, juniper and dry-stone wall, a five-minute walk from the pebble cove of Cala Llucalari. The whitewashed farm buildings once operated as an artist's agriturismo before the Paris-based Experimental Group took them on, restoring the golden Marés stone structures with local craftsmen and opening the property in 2019, its first agrotourism venture and its first stop in the Balearics. The hotel counts 43 rooms and suites across the main house, plus nine freestanding villas with their own dipping pools scattered through the grounds. It is the work of Olivier Bon, Pierre-Charles Cros and Romée de Goriainoff, three childhood friends who opened the Experimental Cocktail Club in Paris in 2007 and have since built a small, recognisable group of hotels in London, Paris, Venice, Biarritz and Ibiza. Inside, Dorothée Meilichzon, on what was then her largest project for the group, kept the original beams, dry-stone floors and terracotta tile and layered in her usual Art Deco curve, most visible in the arched headboards said to echo the Menorcan sunrise and in the hand-glazed Portuguese tiles lining the bathrooms. Bedspreads come from the Moroccan textile house LRNCE; colours run to ochre, terracotta and a blue pulled from the sea beyond the pines. The kitchen, run by chef Sylvain Roucayrol, works largely from the hotel's own vegetable garden, serving Catalan and Balearic dishes at a 30-seat communal table indoors or on the terrace, and the infinity pool turns into a cocktail bar as the light drops, in keeping with a group whose original business was drinks rather than beds. There is a small spa with three treatment rooms and a shop stocking Menorcan and Experimental-branded goods, plus binoculars left in every room for the birdlife along the estate's trails to the coast. What it feels like is a French idea of Menorcan rural life, done with real money and a clear design brief, louder in the evenings than the finca's original farmers would recognise. Families take over the pool and gardens by day, helped along by a baby club and child-sized loungers, and the bar fills with a Paris-and-London crowd once the light turns gold. It suits travellers who want a design hotel with a working kitchen garden attached, not a boutique inn that happens to have wifi, and who don't mind sharing 30 hectares of pine and juniper with other people's children. You should not come if you want an unpolished, purely Menorcan stay; the hotel is a French hospitality group's version of the island, not the island itself, and it closes for the winter, running late March to late October only. You should not come, either, if you want adults-only quiet; the baby club and family suites see to that. You should come for what the Experimental Group does well across its hotels: a kitchen garden run with intent, a bar programme that outclasses most on the island, and rooms designed with enough restraint that the finca's nineteenth-century bones are still visible under Meilichzon's colour. The short version: A nineteenth-century Menorcan finca on the island's quiet south side, restored by the Experimental Group in 2019 with 43 rooms, nine private-pool villas, interiors by Dorothée Meilichzon and a kitchen garden run by chef Sylvain Roucayrol, open only from late March to late October.