La Mirande Hotel

La Mirande Hotel

Avignon is one of those French cities that does not ask to be discovered. The Palais des Papes is the largest Gothic palace in the world, the walled city is intact, the markets are good, and the surrounding Provence produces wine and food that the rest of the country quietly envies. La Mirande is directly behind the Palais des Papes, a position so close that some of the 26 rooms look directly out at its medieval walls through antique windows, which is either going to mean something to you or it is not. The building began as a cardinal's palace in the 14th century, became a baroque townhouse in the 17th, and was restored by the Stein family between 1987 and 1990 as a meticulous recreation of an 18th-century aristocratic residence. The word meticulous earns its place here: the walls are hung with hand-printed historic cotton prints named after the great Provençal textile traditions, the floors are hand-crafted oak parquet, and the antiques, tapestries, and original artworks throughout are the result of years of research rather than a decorator's shortcut. Each of the 26 rooms is individually conceived around a different print and palette. The effect is of a private house assembled over generations by someone with both resources and genuine taste. The food is as considered as the rest of the house.The Michelin-starred restaurant holds both a star and a Green Star, the latter for chef Thomas Longuesserre's commitment to the hotel's organic garden and local suppliers. La Table Haute, in the medieval kitchen downstairs, is a chef's table dinner cooked on a 19th-century wood-burning range, and the cooking school has been running since 1994. The bar and tea room, the garden, the private lounges, the resident cat, all of it adds up to something that functions more like a very well-appointed private house than a conventional hotel. This is a hotel for people who are genuinely interested in where they are, in the layers of the place, the food, the history, the light of Provence in the late afternoon. July and August bring the Festival d'Avignon, which transforms the city entirely; the weeks either side are quieter and, for most visitors, more themselves. The short version: A 26-room 18th-century cardinal's palace directly behind the Palais des Papes, with a Michelin-starred restaurant, a cooking school in the medieval kitchen, and interiors that read as the most serious decorative arts project in French hotel-making.