A novel coarse and fine hybrid granular routing network architecture is proposed. Virtual direct links (VDLs) defined by the coarse granular routing to bridge distant node pairs, and routing via VDL mitigate the spectrum narrowing caused by optical filtering at wavelength-selective switches in ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing) nodes. The impairment mitigation yields denser channel accommodation in the frequency domain, which substantially increases fiber spectral efficiency. The proposed network simultaneously utilizes fine granular optical path level routing so that optical paths can be effectively accommodated in VDLs. The newly developed network design algorithm presented in this paper effectively implements routing and spectrum assignment to paths in addition to optimizing VDL establishment and path accommodation to VDLs. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through both numerical and experimental evaluations; the number of fibers necessary in a network, and the spectrum bandwidth and hop count product are, respectively, reduced by up to 18% and increased by up to 111%.