Le Moulin De Lourmarin

Le Moulin De Lourmarin

In the village of Lourmarin, in the Luberon, on the south-east edge of Provence, a former olive oil mill dating to the 18th century was converted into a hotel in 1980, its stone walls and the old press machinery left visible in places where they once crushed the olives of the surrounding groves. The hotel sits within Relais & Chateaux, with 20 rooms and suites spread across the mill building and adjoining village houses, and the village itself, ranked among the most beautiful in France, is the kind of place Albert Camus chose to be buried in, his grave a short walk from the hotel's door. Under its current ownership, the property has kept the scale modest, the kind of number that means breakfast on the terrace is a conversation rather than a logistics exercise. Inside, the architecture does the talking, vaulted stone ceilings, exposed beams, and in the lower floors the old mill machinery, iron gears and grinding stones, kept as fixtures rather than museum pieces. Rooms are furnished in a pared-back Provençal style, white walls, terracotta tiles, the odd antique piece, without the lavender-and-toile excess that afflicts so many hotels in this region. The restaurant, Le Moulin, serves a kitchen built around Provençal produce, market vegetables, olive oil from groves you can see from the dining room, lamb from the hills, with a wine list weighted heavily towards the Luberon and the southern Rhone. There is a pool in the garden, shaded by plane trees, and the spa is small, more a courtesy than a destination. What it feels like is staying inside a village rather than next to one, the front door opens onto a narrow street with shutters and stone facades on either side, and the walk from your room to dinner takes you past the same bakery and the same square that everyone in Lourmarin uses. It suits people who want Provence without the performance of it, who would rather spend an afternoon reading on a stone terrace than ticking off lavender fields from a car window, and who don't need a a gym or a kids' club to feel looked after. The pace is set by the village, market day on Friday, the church bells, the heat of the afternoon when the shutters come down. You should not come if you want a resort experience, sprawling grounds, multiple restaurants, a spa with a full treatment menu, or anything resembling entertainment after dinner. You should come for the village itself, for a hotel that feels like an extension of Lourmarin rather than an insertion into it, for the chance to walk to Camus's grave before breakfast and back to a terrace with coffee and the morning light on stone that has been there since long before anyone thought to make it a hotel. The short version: A 20-room former olive mill in the heart of Lourmarin, Relais & Chateaux, Provençal cooking, and a village setting that does most of the work.