This is the Concierge Edit, where we share collections of stays from the archive you can actually book with LINEAR. (More on Concierge here, if you’re new here.) This month, we’re going to three hotels that feel strangely familiar, remembering versions of Spain that may never have existed.
Menorca, in the 1960s, hadn’t yet found the success of its neighbors to the north. And when it finally did in the 1970s, its hotels leaned more functional, relying on white stucco, metal-railed balconies, and plastic pool toys to support the second wave of mass-market sun-seekers. Some 50 years later, Hotel Riviera occupies the former Hotel Madrid (1973), this time bathed in Aperol hues — the island’s answer to Capri, decades late and imagined into being. Menorca has a history of inventing its past, after all: the island’s iconic “fishing village,” Binibeca Vell, was itself built for tourists.
STAY AT HOTEL RIVIERA FROM $120/NIGHT →
Starck is no stranger to narrative or world building. We wrote about his Maison Heler in France, a surrealist project that asks the visitor to imagine the story of an eccentric inventor who comes home to find his mansion raised 16 stories in the air. For Brach Madrid, he looks to the 1920s and ‘30s, when the city’s grand interiors became stages for the newly modern social life of real figures like Dalí, Buñuel, and Lorca. Starck doesn’t reconstruct that world so much as invent a life inside it: a man mourning a lost lover, whose home is filled with the traces of their life together — photographs, boxing gloves, musical instruments, travel souvenirs, even a green ceramic mirror he made for her himself.
STAY AT BRACH MADRID FROM $520/NIGHT — LINEAR PERKS AVAILABLE →
In San Sebastián, we go to Mendi Argia, designed by Openhouse Studio alongside From a Clear Height, a fictional story by Inma Buendía imagining the life that might eventually unfold inside the early 20th-century villa. Its protagonist spends the day wandering San Sebastián — visiting an exhibition at Tabakalera, stopping at San Telmo, eating pintxos in the old town — before climbing back up Mount Ulia to Mendi Argia. There, she lingers in a bathtub at the foot of the bed as sunset washes the room orange, pink, and blue, before stepping onto the balcony in a silk robe to watch the last light reflect off the Kursaal below.