An unprepossessing facade on Sóller’s main square gives way to a high-Edwardian, art-nouveau fantasy. Check in to the Hotel La Vila and check it out.
Every day, María Campins would stand outside the door of the town house, peer in, see that her worst fears hadn’t been realized and move along. “My father painted and decorated the house,” she would tell anyone who’d stop to have a look inside too as workers with wheelbarrows rushed in and clouds of dust billowed out into Sóller’s main square. “I hope they don’t destroy all his hard work.”
Toni Oliver had seen the old woman plenty of times since he and his business partners had taken over the house with a view to turning it into a hotel back in 2005.
“I saw her out there and she seemed very anxious that we’d ruin it,” he says. “But there was never any fear of that. From the very first moment I saw the house I knew we had to restore it to its former glory.”
Sóller native Toni had worked in the hotel business for many years and had always wanted to run a hotel of his own. “But I’d never really found anywhere that ticked all the right boxes. Not until I saw the “For Sale” sign hanging here on this old house right on the square.
“To be honest, I’d never really paid much attention to the house nor had most people in Sóller. It had been closed up for years, it looked neglected, and the front was narrow, not particularly imposing.”
Inside the 1904 house, it was a different story, however. The interiors – a vivacious and wonderfully preserved sampler of early 20th-century haute-bourgeoisie taste and style – were completely intact. It looks like a set that the late Sir Cecil Beaton might have designed for My Fair Lady.
“I was amazed. It was a work of art. It needed a lot of work, that much was obvious, but I knew it was unique and had to be restored,” recalls Toni.
Almost every surface was decorated or ornamented in some way. In some of the rooms the walls were stenciled in an exuberant transitional style, swinging wildly from florid French art nouveau to the more restrained and rectilinear Jugendstil of the Vienna secession movement. In other rooms there are candy-colored, tiled dadoes of Walter Crane-inspired landscapes that are all sweetness and light. The plasterwork of the ceilings mixes high Edwardian Adamesque neoclassical decoration and motifs with rococo swirls. Idealized, naive, Mediterranean landscapes have been painted into roundels decorating a frieze running around a rear sitting room, now used as the hotel bar and restaurant. All of the hydraulic tiled floors were extant and only needed a loving wash and wax. Whoever built and decorated this house in 1904 clearly suffered from what is commonly known as a horror vacui.
“People thought we were mad. They said just paint it white, don’t fuss and be done with it,” recalls Toni of when he started looking around for someone to restore the house.
“A team of eight women worked six days a week for two months on the restoration. They’d never really done anything like this before. They’d done churches and so on, but nothing like this.”
“Of course we couldn’t respect the whole layout. Otherwise, we’d have only got three or four rooms and the project wouldn’t have been viable,” explains Toni, adding that most of the work was done in just six months. “As we rushed to get it finished in time for Easter this year we had up to 30 workers in here.”
The hotel has been a hit with locals and tourists alike. “People come in and look around. It’s like a museum, some days!” says Toni.
“It’s been a lot of work, more than we’d bargained for. But it’s been worth it. Definitely”
Hotel La Vila, Plaça Constitució, 14, Sóller.
Tel. 971 634 641 www.lavilahotel.com
