TRAVELING IN STYLE : La Residencia: It’s No Place Like Home : This extraordinary hideaway in the craggy mountains of northwestern Majorca traces its lineage to the 16th Century

Morning

You awaken to a blur of bird song and a sigh of still-cool mountain air through slanting shutters. You stretch and yawn in a big bed with an inlaid hardwood headboard, opening your eyes slowly to fresh-white walls and beamed ceilings, red-tile floors and dark antiques.

Eventually, at an easy pace, you find your way downstairs to a shaded stone terrace where subdued waiters are calmly serving breakfast. You sink into an oversize wicker armchair and find yourself almost immediately addressing a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a pot of good coffee, a boiled farmhouse egg and a basket of delicious bread and local pastries. Across the broad lawn below, nestled in a cradle of green, terraced hills, are clusters of tile-roofed field-stone houses and--above them--a gray-rock bluff set against the Mediterranean sky. There is a smell of mock orange and, faintly, of the damp smoke that rises in a thick plume behind one house--a gardener burning off just-cut long grass. In the distance you can hear the sour bleating of sheep. It occurs to you that there is really no good reason to move from where you sit--maybe ever.

La Residencia is an extraordinary hideaway hotel in the craggy mountains of northwestern Majorca, a beautiful island in the western Mediterranean, 150 miles or so out from Valencia. About 1,400 square miles, Majorca is an island of contrasts: high-gloss tourist beaches and secret rocky coves or calas ; severe cliffs and rolling hills; well-ordered almond orchards and shaggy woods of oak and juniper; busy, brassy Palma, the island’s seaport capital, and storybook municipalities such as Deya, home to La Residencia.

The hotel is a typical old Majorcan mansion, or rather a little compound of two mansions--one of them said to date from the 16th Century--plus a third building in the same style but dating from 1989. The lobby is a cool salon with stone floors, the reception desk a big oak table. The extensive public spaces, indoors and out, meander and turn, sometimes hiding just out of sight as they might in a rambling private home. The furnishings are mostly antiques, and there is art (of varying quality, it must be admitted) on nearly every wall. There is also a small display of exquisite, limited-edition books by Thomas Graves (son of English poet, novelist and critic Robert Graves, who died here in 1985), a master printer who still lives in Deya.

Germany and England have in a sense collaborated to create La Residencia, for the hotel is owned by a group of German and English investors. One of these is high-profile English entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group PLC--which began as a mail-order phonograph-record outlet in 1969 and is now a multimillion-dollar business empire encompassing more than 100 companies in the entertainment, travel (Virgin Airways), publishing and retail fields.

He got involved with La Residencia, the 38-year-old Branson says, “because when I was 18, I met a woman called Kristen and we fell in love and got married. Then, four years later, she fell in love with someone else, so we divorced and she went off to live with him in Majorca. We remained friends, though, and one day several years ago she called me to ask if I would like to be associated with a hotel project she was working on with the man who is now her husband, a German named Axel Ball. Because Kristen is very artistic and has great taste, I knew that she would do this kind of thing superbly well, so I agreed. We joined forces again, this time on a business basis, and La Residencia was the result.” The group plans other similar projects, Branson says, and has already purchased a property to develop on the Greek island of Hydra.

Midday

Having stirred at last from the wicker armchair, you stroll up smooth stone steps toward the swimming pool, trying to identify all the trees and shrubs and flowers that crowd the grounds along the way--eucalyptus, for instance, cypresses, and fig, carob, lemon and orange trees, lilacs, gnarled old olive trees, flame-bright bougainvillea, hibiscus, bamboo, hydrangeas, the mock orange with a fragrance that haunts the air, grapevines, rows of high, thick rosemary, jade plants, geraniums, irises, roses, incandescent blue cornflowers.

Settling onto a solid chaise lounge next to the pool (105 feet long), you notice how the mountains wrap around, enclosing you in a natural amphitheater of high stone, isolating you, comforting you. You hear new sounds--a church bell, the rustling of palm fronds, the faint lilt of jazz from a little speaker at the outdoor restaurant-bar overlooking the pool. A couple talks in low, warm tones. A goddess dives into the pool.

You wonder idly if you should be doing something. The hotel has a tennis court, for instance, and can find you a tennis partner or arrange lessons. It can also send you horseback riding, offer hints for picnic sites or direct you to a pharmacist in Deya who rents out bicycles. If the Mediterranean beckons, La Residencia offers shuttle service four or five times a day to a little rock beach in the cove of Lluc Alcari.

Or you can go sightseeing by car to the nearby Son Marroig villa. Built by Austrian archduke Ludwig Salvator (1847-1915), who ensconced himself there for decades, the villa is now open to the public as a museum displaying the archduke’s collection of local furniture, crafts and archeological finds, and as a sometime venue for chamber-music concerts.

Ludwig is also remembered with a small museum down the road in Valldemosa--a village more famous for its Carthusian monastery, in which George Sand and Chopin spent a notorious winter in 1838-39. Slightly longer drives will take you to the pretty little coves of Santa Ponsa or Paguera, or the lush Alfabia Gardens--or even into Palma, about 40 minutes away, to visit the capital city’s magnificent Gothic cathedral (with its altar canopy designed by the great Catalan Moderniste architect Gaudi) or its fascinating medieval quarter.

On the other hand, you could simply lie here by the pool, reading a little, napping, maybe slipping into the water, maybe eventually sipping a Campari or a glass of wine right where you are or climbing a few steps to the restaurant for a light lunch--gazpacho and a potato omelet, perhaps, or a tomato salad and grilled fresh fish.

Nighttime

Immediately adjacent to La Residencia, and also owned by Branson and partners but under different management, is a luxurious restaurant, El Olivo. Here, a young German-born chef named Josef Sauerschell prepares elegant “modern Mediterranean” food, mostly French or Spanish in inspiration and based strongly on Majorca’s own bounty of culinary raw materials--especially the fresh fish, lamb, game birds and fruits and vegetables for which the island is famous. Sauerchell’s menu changes constantly, but recent offerings have included a cream of potato soup with oregano, chicken-liver salad with green beans, John Dory in orange sauce, besugo (red bream) with fennel, chicken breast in mushroom sauce, lamb loin with cabbage and fillet of pork with curry sauce--all of it light, superbly fresh and handsomely presented. Two prix-fixe menus are offered daily. One, at about $35 per person, might include a mixed-vegetable salad with good Spanish ham, fillet of lamb in sweet red pepper sauce and homemade passion fruit sorbet; the other, more elaborate at about $55, might begin with a quail salad with foie gras and truffles; proceed to cream of nasturtium soup with baby shrimp, hake in vermouth sauce with fresh asparagus and fillet of veal in lemon sauce; and conclude with pineapple fritters with rum sauce.

The dining room is impossibly romantic, especially in the evening--long and high in stone, tile and dark wood and full of candle-lit balconies and alcoves. The service is capable and charming. There are no false notes, no jarring intrusions: you feast in peace.

You sit outside again, on the terrace where you lingered so contentedly this morning, this time sipping espresso or perhaps a snifter of Majorca’s excellent Suau (“Smooth”) brandy or the local anise-flavored herb liqueur called Hierbas, available in dry or sweet versions. The silence now is thick and warm. The houses on the hills are closed up for the evening and illuminated by yellow lamps placed with a formidable sense of drama and proportion. A full moon rises over the mountains, backlighting them on the bold rock and turning them deep black.

Dew glistens on the grass. You can smell the sea in the distance. You find yourself growing gently drowsy, and eventually go happily off to bed, already dreaming about waking up to another perfect day.

DETAILS

Getting there: Iberia flies from LAX to Palma de Majorca via a connecting flight in Madrid. Pan Am, TWA and American also fly from the U.S. to Madrid. There are more frequent connections from Barcelona, about half an hour from Palma by air, and both Iberia and TWA fly nonstop from New York to Barcelona.

A ferry service to Majorca leaves daily from Barcelona. The trip takes 8-10 hours and tickets must be bought in Spain. Renting a car in Palma (or ferrying one over) is highly recommended for getting around, although La Residencia can arrange transport from the Palma airport.

Accommodations: La Residencia has only 46 rooms--including two lovely suites with large terraces and a view of the Mediterranean--and prospective visitors should be warned that the hotel tends to be booked far in advance. Spring and fall, when the weather is always mild in Majorca, are especially popular--and in the summertime whole families, most them German or English (all of them appreciative and respectful of the hotel’s peaceful setting), tend to move in for weeks at a time. (La Residencia closes for approximately two months at the beginning of each year; in 1991, it will be shuttered from January 6th through March 17th.)

Rates: About $135 for a standard single room, $228 for a deluxe double. Suites are around $375. (Rates during the low season--next year between April 8 and May 1; and November 1 to December 14-- are about one-third less. Continental breakfast is included, but 12% VAT tax is additional. La Residencia requires a 25% deposit with reservations (refundable with one month’s notice). Credit cards are accepted, but reluctantly. Reservations: La Residencia, 07179 Deya, Majorca, Balearic Islands, Spain. Telephone: 011--34-971-63-90-11. Fax: 011- 34-971-63-93-70.