The spacious garden and pool at the St Regis Mardavall, Mallorca

In the fifth installment of our luxury travel views columns, LUX’s Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai checks in at the St Regis Mardavall in Mallorca

What drew us there?

A huge rolling lawn, two swimming pools, trees and flowerbeds, beyond which stretches more thick grass, the cliff edge and the sea. Face inland and beyond the pools there is a graceful low-rise building, and mountaintops beyond. It’s not what you expect of a hotel in Mallorca, which, by folklore has been split into crowded coastal regions and beautiful but isolated inland areas. Yet here we were, by the sea in the southwest, with as much space as you could imagine. The space between sun loungers could be measured in tens of metres, rather than centimetres, as in many Mediterranean resorts in midsummer. We could have popped a champagne cork from our sun loungers, watched it fly and descend, and still not meet guests on the nearest loungers. You can get that and more in a villa, but few villas have the facilities of a luxury hotel to hand, and, anyway, we rather like seeing elegant strangers at a distance, rather than just our own wonderful guests.

The indoor-outdoor terrace with its endless view

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How was the stay?

You can, of course, enjoy delightful isolation at the Mardavall. This was amplified in our rooms: we had a suite at garden level with its own private pool, separated from the rest of the grounds by a floral hedge. The private pool was situated in our own private garden, with outdoor dining table, sofa, chairs and loungers – and a similar setup inside in case of bad weather (very rare here). If one of the definitions of luxury is unexpected peace, then this was luxury. The Mardavall is also beautifully located. It’s a few steps from the beach, and fewer than 15 minutes drive from Palma, the island’s capital, which has transformed in recent years from a slightly down-at-heel port with a rich history to a rather beautifully preserved historic city: Barcelona without the tourists. We made the foray into Palma a couple of nights, but, in the main, one could be very happy just at the resort. Es Fum, its one Michelin-starred restaurant, is an extremely elegant place to enjoy a lingering dinner, and we also liked the beach vibe and food of the Pool Bar Sa Badia. It’s not a Mykonos beach club, and that’s precisely why to go.

The relaxing St Regis bar

Read more: Royal Riviera, Côte d’Azur Review

Anything else?

Med-hotel beach shops vary in quality, but the little boutique here is quite magnificent for its selection of hard-to-find boutique brands. Not what you’d expect and kudos to its manager. The Mardavall is the kind of place you miss all winter and look forward to returning to in the summer.

Find out more: www.marriott.com

This article was first published in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of LUX

Bentley’s latest Bentayga SUV is more environmentally friendly, faster, more comfortable

LUX Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai discovers Bentley’s new, faster and more environmentally friendly Bentayga model revealed earlier this week

You, dear LUX reader, have a transport conundrum. Your driver is self-isolating, and you have a desperate need to transport yourself, your latest husband, two very long adolescent offspring, and a large number of Louis Vuitton suitcases, from the private aviation terminal at Nice airport to your villa above St Tropez. (The husband does not do helicopters).

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We are pleased to say that a solution is at hand, courtesy of British (well, British-based) automobile manufacturer Bentley and its new Bentayga SUV, announced this week.

You will naturally have been familiar with the existing Bentayga, which was pretty much the most luxurious way to transport a large family at frightening speed while taking up most of the Autoroute Provencale.

The new model is more environmentally friendly, faster, more comfortable and has more room in the rear for those ever-growing adolescents, or alternatively your long-legged late night companions home from La Voile Rouge and, crucially, it looks better: sleeker, and less huge.

Read more: Two of London’s best restaurants in our home

Apparently, it drives better also, thanks to a wider track between the wheels and various other improvements that we won’t go into here. The key point is that you will feel like les genoux de l’abeille (the bee’s knees) as you hand the keys to the voiturier at Les Caves. Now, where’s the alcohol-free Dom Perignon?

Discover more: bentleymotors.com

Masseria Cardinale is one of The Thinking Traveller’s larger villas in Sicily, located in the countryside with authentic design features

The Thinking Traveller is a villa rental company that offers exclusive access to some of the most desirable properties in the Mediterranean. Guests of The Thinking Traveller also gain access to local insider knowledge through the company’s on-the-ground concierge team who plan bespoke itineraries and experiences. Here, we speak to the founders Huw and Rossella Beaugié about their villa selection process, luxury retreats and their intrinsically sustainable ethos

Rossella & Huw Beaugié

LUX: How was the concept for The Thinking Traveller conceived?
Huw Beaugié: We started the company in 2002. Prior to that [Rossella and I] had been living in Paris, where we met in ‘98. Rossella was a cell biologist doing her PhD in Paris and I was an engineer working in marketing at that time. Rossella is from Sicily, so we had been travelling to Sicily a lot already. We went there in November 2000 and that was the kind of the catalyst. We climbed up a mountain called Stromboli, and doing that made us decide that we would like to move there for a bit, which we ended up doing two years later.

Rossella Beaugié: We started doing walking tours first of all and then very soon my friends started saying ‘oh we’ve got this nice house on the island, would you want to try renting it out?’. So the first brochure we put together had three walking tours with volcanos and hills, and then seven villas, I think. At the time we were doing everything ourselves but it worked.

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Huw Beaugié: There wasn’t anything of great quality in Sicily so we realised that we needed to really help these villa owners to create a property and product that would fit our clients and the people we wanted to be our clients. We started advising [the property owners], helping with design and we even began advancing money to invest in pools or refurbishments. We would make contact with interior designers to help them develop the houses. Really quickly we figured that if we were making all these investments, the only way we could really work with these houses and make it profitable would be to deal with them exclusively. That is one of the things we have stuck with ever since. We started with seven houses and we now have about 220 in various destinations in the Mediterranean, but the really vital and big unique selling point is that they are all exclusive to us and that means we can still keep on investing to make sure the quality and service is right, and to have our people on the ground to support that. We are expanding slowly, being careful to always keep the quality increasing rather than diluting.

Views over the Sicilian countryside from the pool at Masseria Cardinale

Rossella Beaugié: The secret has been that right from the beginning. For the first 10 years we were in Sicily so we were around the whole time and then we started hiring staff who are really knowledgeable people and know everybody locally, meaning they can find the best doctor if needed, the best yoga teacher or if you wanted to organise a dinner we can do that. We don’t have reps who move around, our staff work for us 12 months a year and they have insider knowledge.

LUX: What challenges have you encountered now that your main offices are in the UK and you’re based here?
Rossella Beaugié: We have developed quite slowly. There have been two regions that we were interested in but because we hadn’t found the right people or properties we wanted to offer clients, we decided not to go with them. We are happy with the regions we’re working in because we have amazing teams and the owners of properties share our priorities and ethos. The team here receive so many offers of villas everywhere, we could have 10,000 villas! We get that many offers because they see the website, they like it and we have a good reputation, but we have been careful of where we go and what we take on.

Faro di Brucoli is a refurbished lighthouse in Sicily with views of Mount Etna across the Ionian Sea

LUX: How do you select the villas to represent?
Rossella Beaugié: They tend to come to us. It is usually owners knowing us already, maybe due to our reputation amongst other owners who also have these kinds of top level properties. So what we do first of all is decide whether it’s for us and we can see that now straight away with Google and photos.

Read more: High altitude luxury at Riffelalp Resort 2222m, Zermatt

Huw Beaugié: Probably 70% of them we cut immediately. The next 30% we go further and ask for more information, and then perhaps the final 5% will end up with a visit and a detailed report and out of those, we probably only take on one property.

Here and above: Iola is a contemporary villa located on the Greek island of Corfu with sweeping sea views

LUX: What are the key elements you’re looking for?
Rossella Beaugié: We are now at a stage where we know what our clients want so we have criteria, but at the bottom of it, we really need to truly like the property in terms of style and we have to know that the owner could be a good partner because it’s their house and they continue managing the property so they need to be able to reinvest and sort out problems quickly. In terms of more objective criteria, the location and views are important but it depends on the region. Greece, for example, is really all about location so being on the sea and beaches. Privacy is also important and then there are all the things like ensuite bedrooms, a good kitchen, a nice-sized pool, not being overlooked. Then once we take on the property, we have a list of stuff that they have to have such as good quality linen, appliances etc. We recommend things and then our local managers go and do what we call a quality check.

Read more: Founder of Nila House Lady Carole Bamford’s guide to Jaipur

LUX: Is it important to you to have a wide range of different properties in your portfolio?
Rossella Beaugié: Yes, we have clients that have gone from a very charming, chic, three-bedroom house in Puglia and then they book our best property in Sicily, which sleeps 24 with a chef because maybe they are doing a multi generation family holiday, or it’s someone’s wedding anniversary and they want to invite everyone. So yes, we need diversity in terms of size and level of service. Some people could afford to have service everyday but they just want privacy, they want to be able to go around without clothes if they like. Then there are also different styles of property. Some people want minimal or really cutting-edge design, and some other people want to go to a place in Puglia or Sicily with traditional charm.

Huw Beaugié: We also work a lot with people who haven’t even started building. The optimum situation is when someone comes to us and says ‘I’ve bought a piece of land’ or ‘I’m looking to buy a piece of land, and what are your suggestions?’ Or people say ‘I’ve bought this ruin and what should I do with it?’ With those projects, we are involved from the beginning right through to the delivery. We suggest interior designers, architects, landscape designers, everything. Those are the villas that tend to perform the best.

Masseria Cardinale (here and above) offers guests traditional charm combined with luxurious modern amenities

LUX: Can you tell us a bit more about the experiences side of the business? What can you make happen for your clients?
Huw Beaugié: We try to make anything happen that the clients want as long as it’s not against the law!

Rossella Beaugié: The kinds of things that are becoming standard for us is that everyone wants a cook. Especially in Puglia and Sicily, people want to learn to cook and so we organise cooking classes either in the villas or on vineyards. We have three kids who were born in Sicily and grew up there which means we were able to try out things with them and find out what they found boring. From that, we designed some guided experiences with experts who will prepare the tours on two levels so that it works for the parents and it’s entertaining for the kids. Wine tasting is very requested, and water sports are popular, but then we also have occasions like weddings when people want a Steinway piano in the garden or a certain opera singer to perform.

Read more: Inside The Dorchester Collection’s first branded residences

Huw Beaugié: What we are starting to do more of is themed weeks so things like getting a celebrity chef out to a villa for a week and creating a programme for full immersion in the food, which might include cooking classes, demonstrations and tours of markets. This year, we are doing a partnership with Bodyism so that you can take a wellness instructor out with you to the villa.

The Thinking Traveller has paired up with McQueens Flower shop to offer guests flower arranging courses at Palazzo Gorgoni (above), one of their properties in Puglia

LUX: What’s your approach to sustainability?
Huw Beaugié: It’s the same as when we started. The basic model of restoring or building unique properties in rural locations or old towns using local people to build, cook and garden, all of that is just inherently sustainable. Generally, you’re also using local materials and the money is staying local. The things that have been added to that model since 2004 is more use of solar energy. However, sustainable a client is they never want to give up on air conditioning, which is one of the single biggest consumers of energy in a villa so solar energy supplements that. Then the other big thing is water: drinking water and swimming pool water. Swimming pools lose hundreds of litres of water a day through evaporation so we encourage people to cover pools when they’re not using them and at night. Same with air con, setting the temperature between 24 and 27 degrees, for example, rather than at 18 degrees and wrapping yourself up in a duvet, which uses a lot more energy. In terms of drinking water, we are doing a big campaign to try and get people to install water filters in their homes, which is difficult in the Med where bottled water is standard, but it’s changing.

Rossella Beaugié: We have these little leaflets which we leave in the houses called ‘Think Green’ which have sustainability tips for guests. People are more aware of sustainability issues so it is easier now than it was in the past to encourage these ways of behaving.

View The Thinking Traveller’s portfolio of properties: thethinkingtraveller.com

The Abama overlooks the volcanic island of Gomera

LUX steps into a different universe of tranquillity, colour and cuisine at The Ritz-Carlton Abama resort in Tenerife, a short hop from western Europe

Stepping out of your room into a kaleidoscope washed by warm salty air is a delicious feeling. The kaleidoscope was the lavishly planted sea of flowers in multilayered, terraced tropical gardens around the villa where we were staying. A short stroll along the path took us past even more plants, trees and flowers of every conceivable colour, which rose first past several organically shaped pools and then onto the terrace where breakfast was served.

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The Ritz-Carlton Abama is located on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean and a volcanic island opposite. During breakfast time, this island was always covered in a mysterious, horror-movie murk, almost indistinguishable from the light-blue sky around it. The sun rises slowly in equatorial zones, and even though the morning air had a hint of chill in it, due to the coldness of the sea currents, we were indeed in an equatorial zone off the coast of Africa. The Canary Islands may have become host, in part, to unglamorous mass tourism recently, but they first came into Western awareness as a hive of distinctive species and ecosystems.

The villas are set in lush gardens

The days soon took on a familiar rhythm. Adjacent to the breakfast terrace, a 50-metre pool, curvaceous and irregular, is boarded by rows of sun lounges with a view down over the gardens to the sea. As the sun became stronger, we moved down to the beach, where a seafood and grill restaurant was washed by calling breezes and salty air. There is cliff jumping from either side of the bay where the long, sandy beach is located, and in the next bay you can jump from black volcanic rock to black volcanic rock admiring great schools of crabs, blue and orange, living in the twilight zone beneath them, between land and ocean.

Read more: Gaggenau’s latest initiative to support emerging artisans

Swimming in the clear sea, sheltered by a breakwater, involved being accompanied by fish – sometimes individuals, sometimes in shoals, occasionally monochrome, usually in an array of colours to match and even outdo their plant-based counterparts on land, with fluorescent blues and oranges all the vogue.

If we had not had the energy in the morning, an early-evening game at the tennis centre based around perfect clay courts next to the (celebrated) golf course was a way of adding to the exercise quotient, before either moving to one of the restaurants, or dining on room service on our own terrace overlooking treetops, banana plantations, the ocean and the volcanic island of Gomera. In the evening, this was lit up in pinks and greens, and strung by lights from its occasional roads, just visible from our vantage point 20 miles away across the water.

Abama’s main pool – one of seven at the resort

Fine dining is not often associated with the Canary Islands, something the original creators of Abama sought to change when building this resort. Unusually for an island in the Atlantic, 1,000 miles from the southern tip of Spain, it has Michelin-starred restaurants and an array of other dining spots with specialised cuisines and, often, spectacular views.

The most notable is Kabuki, a Japanese restaurant high above the resort and the 18- hole championship golf course. The whole resort is built on a steep volcanic slope, meaning the view down from Kabuki to the gardens, plantations, swimming pools and the sea is particularly captivating at dusk. Aperitifs are served on the terrace, and inside, the restaurant serves a celebrated blend of local and Japanese cuisine. The flame-seared fish nigiri is easily the most memorable thing on the menu.

At the other end of the resort, although by no means at the other end of the scale, El Mirador is an eagle’s nest atop cliffs that plunge down to the ocean. From the tables you can hear the sea crashing against the rocks far below and smell the ocean spray. Appropriately, El Mirador serves grilled fish and seafood, and is also celebrated for Spanish cuisine from a different part of the country: black rice paella. Like a number of the restaurants in the resort, it also serves a mean bowl of Canarian potatoes, which maximise on intense, nutty taste, accompanied by red and green chilli sauces.

The kitchen and terrace at El Mirado

The cascade of colours at sunset at El Mirador is a match for any oceanside location in the world, and a fitting end to a day that began with the kaleidoscope of flowers outside the villas. The villas themselves are the most secluded category of accommodation in a resort that is bigger than it may seem, so well blended is it with its natural context. We had a seaview suite, including a large living room, huge bedroom and two balconies, which should be plenty for any couple. It can be combined with an adjoining (equally large) bedroom for a family area big enough to match many people’s homes. Interior décor is all cool stone and tiles, with equally large bathrooms to match. And that fabulous morning cascade of colour as soon as you draw the curtain, or open the door.

One-bedroom suites in villas at The Ritz-Carlton Abama Tenerife start from €615, plus tax. Find out more: ritzcarlton.com/abama

This article was originally published in the Autumn 19 Issue.

Beach front villa with private pool

Why should I go now?

Monsoon season is one of the most beautiful times to go to Vietnam. The landscape is lush and green, and whilst the showers are fierce, it makes the periods of blue skies and blazing sunshine even sweeter. Nestled within a forest of palm trees on a peninsula of white sand, The Anam is a vibrant, tropical paradise.

What’s the lowdown?

Image by James Houston

The Anam opened in April this year as the first and only World Luxury property in Vietnam, and whilst it should still be in the teething stages, there’s very little to suggest this is a new face in the luxury world, apart from a few bare walls where local artworks are due to be hung. The design is colonial with traditional Vietnamese detailing, handmade lanterns and ornate, tiled floors with columns allowing the cool sea breeze to flow through the spaces.

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The food, in all three of the restaurants, is superb, but really exceptional at the recently opened Indochine Grill. It’s European fine dining, intimate and elegant with a live pianist creating an almost Parisian mood. We tried the taster menu and each course was as delicious as the next. During the daytime, there’s a complimentary activity schedule of yoga, kayaking, fishing, volleyball and mini tennis tournaments or you can just lounge on the beach or by one of the three swimming pools, which are open all hours, so that at night you can float on your back whilst listening to live music in the Saigon Bar.

The Indochine European fine dining restaurant.

Getting horizontal

Our villa opened out onto a manicured lawn leading straight down to the sea; lying in bed we could hear the calm, continuous rolling of the waves and glimpse a sparkling line of blue when propped up on pillows with the curtains open in the mornings. Interiors were bright, homely and simple with dark wood furniture contrasted against white walls and linens. The bathroom, at the back of the villa, featured a light well with tropical plants growing up alongside the bathtub. It was quietly luxurious, but in no way overdone, allowing the view to take centre stage.

The Anam. Image by James Houston

Nitpicking

The Anam is everything you could possibly want from a beach resort. Where so many resorts fail, it manages to blend the highest-level of sophistication with a laid-back island kind of attitude. The villas are hard to compete with so the the hotel building at the back of the resort inevitably falls short in comparison. Whilst the rooms here mainly have sea views, the multilayered building feels dark and imposing where the rest of the resort is bright and elegant.

Rates: From USD $215 (approx.€200/£150)

Millie Walton