Except for a small stone sign on Carmel Country Club drive, most drivers would zip right past the entrance to the Grand Del Mar with hardly a notice. But venture a quarter-mile down the gently curving driveway and you're in for a surprise.

Quietly nestled on a sunny promontory in the heart of the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve is one of the state's most luxurious new resorts -- the $300 million Grand Del Mar, which opened with a whisper in October and is still a secret to most San Diego County residents.

The Mediterranean-style resort boasts six restaurants, four swimming pools, a large Elizabethan chapel, a 10,000-square-foot ballroom, 3,400-bottle wine cellar, 21,000-square-foot spa, 18-hole Tom Fazio-designed golf course (with 50,000-square-foot golf clubhouse), 380 lushly landscaped acres, elaborate fountains and 249 guest rooms that start at $430 a night.

Even if you've never heard of Grand Del Mar, luxury travelers from all over the world are in on the secret. On a recent afternoon, the lobby bustled with conventioneers, affluent tourists and foreign visitors.

"Guests come here with high expectations, and what we're hearing from them when they leave is that this place is beyond what they expected," said Tom Voss, president of the resort's owner/operator, Manchester Grand Resorts.

The Grand Del Mar is the crown jewel in Manchester's tiara, which includes three other properties -- the Manchester Grand Hyatt in La Jolla, the Marriott Hotel & Marina in downtown San Diego and the lakefront Whitetail Club & Resort in McCall, Idaho.

Open just seven months, the Grand Del Mar has already earned the notice of the world's leading travel publication, Conde Nast Traveler, which this past week named the resort to its 2008 "Hot List" (in the categories of "Top New Hotel" and "Top New Spa"). The magazine's editors praised the Grand Del Mar for its mix of traditional and modern elements, saying it offered an "homage to Old World design and New Age lifestyles, blending hand-stenciled ceilings and herbal reflexology, gold leaf balusters and flat screen TVs that double as electronic abstract paintings."

Beginnings

When developer Doug Manchester conceived of the Grand Del Mar five years ago, he wanted to re-create the Old World charm of turn-of-the-century hotels he'd visited around the world, and he was inspired by the Spanish/Mediterranean revival designs of architect Addison Mizner, whose 1920s hotels in Boca Raton and Palm Beach, Fla., set the standard for resort opulence.

In 2003, Manchester's company purchased the Meadows Del Mar golf course and grounds (just south of Highway 56 in Carmel Valley) and set about creating a resort of supreme elegance, Voss said.

Three years in the making and requiring the work of 800 construction workers and craftsmen, the Grand Del Mar was designed to look like an expansive Tuscan villa, with Roman-style fountains, Italian marble columns, Portuguese tile floors, hand-painted ceilings and an attention to detail that borders on the obsessive, admits the German-born Voss, a second-generation hotelier who personally tested the beds and linens for the guest rooms himself.

"Doug (Manchester) wanted to build in an Old World way," said the genial Voss, who lives just steps away from the resort with his wife and two children, ages 9 and 11. "The look of this place is over the top, but the money is really in the details."

These details include 150,000 man-hours of work by 120 carpenters crafting wood doors and accents in mahogany, olive, alder, sycamore, maple and other woods in 23 different finishes. A team of 24 artists spent three months designing and hand-stenciling decorative ceilings (no two rooms are alike) throughout the resort. More than 30 types of stone are used in floors, walls and accents around the resort. Real gold leaf was hand-applied to the wrought iron banisters in the stairwells. And the landscape required the installation of more than 10,000 mature trees.

The price of luxury

All of this elegance doesn't come cheap.

A weekend round of golf runs $250. Dinner at the Addison, which is prix-fixe only, offers four courses for $95. Afternoon tea service in the wood-paneled library ranges from $28 to $50. A 75-minute massage in the spa will set you back $225. And the high-end, 2,458-square-foot Manchester Suite rents for $5,500 a night.

But business is booming. The country's economic woes haven't affected the luxury travel business, Voss said. And the weak dollar has made the resort a relative bargain for wealthy European travelers.

Bookings are heavy for mid-June, when the U.S. Open will be played at Torrey Pines Golf Course. And Voss said he expects a strong summer once Del Mar horseracing season begins.

And for guests who can't get enough of the Grand Del Mar, there's the Villas, a collection of eight fully furnished 4,500- to 4,800-square-foot residences (complete with two-car garages, personal elevators, 50-inch plasma TVs, Subzero fridges and baby grand pianos) that offer 10 percent ownership shares starting at $450,000.

Yet in spite of all the luxury, Voss said the resort's staff works to make the guest experience warm and intimate. No matter how fancy a hotel may be, if the guests don't feel welcome, they won't come back, he said.

"We want people to feel like they're at an Old World estate; that it's where they belong," Voss said. "We hope they feel like it's a home away from home -- a very nice home."