Deiá has kept its painters and poets for a century. This summer La Residencia hands three of the Loewe Foundation's craft artists a studio, a bed and two months to work.
The village sits in the Serra de Tramuntana, on the northwest coast of Mallorca, where the mountains drop hard toward the sea. Ochre houses stack up the slope in terraces of olive and citrus. Robert Graves settled here in the 1920s and stayed for the rest of his life, and the place has drawn writers and artists ever since.
La Residencia holds two former manor houses at the top of the village. Belmond runs it now, a hotel of gardens, sculpture and a long pool cut into the terraces above Deiá's roofs. It has kept a working painting studio on the grounds for years, its gate marked by a small hand-lettered sign.
The programme
The hotel has run an artists-in-residence scheme since 2003, cycling different painters and makers through that studio. This year it takes on a new partner. The Loewe Foundation, the cultural arm of the Madrid leather house founded in 1988, is placing three residencies at La Residencia, each running two months.
The artists are drawn from the ranks of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, the annual award the Foundation gives to work in clay, metal, fibre, wood and glass. Craft Prize alumni now come to Deiá to make new work, with the island as the brief. The setting shifts the prize off the gallery wall and into a garden studio for a season.
The prize comes down off the plinth and takes a studio in the hills for the summer.
The Splendid EditThe three
The first cohort comes from three countries. Kaori Juzu works out of Japan. Deirdre McLoughlin is Irish. Dahye Jeong is from South Korea, and carries a Craft Prize win of her own. Each takes the studio in turn, living inside the hotel and the village while the work takes shape.
Courtesy of Belmond — La Residencia, Deiá, Mallorca
Deiá suits the arrangement. The light off the Tramuntana is the reason painters came in the first place, and the village stays small enough that a working artist is a neighbour rather than an attraction. Guests may cross paths with the residents at the studio, or find the new pieces shown on the grounds.
The Craft Prize has spent a decade widening what counts as craft. Deià gives its makers something the exhibition circuit rarely does, which is time and a room with a view of the sea. The rest they bring themselves.
Hotel facts
La Residencia, a Belmond Hotel, sits in Deiá in the Serra de Tramuntana, on Mallorca's northwest coast. Two former manor houses, gardens and terraced pools above the village. The Loewe Foundation residencies run through the summer season; the hotel's own artists-in-residence programme dates to 2003.
The Splendid Edit on La Residencia, Deiá. Details from Belmond and the Loewe Foundation.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — La Residencia, Deiá