La Bastide Saint Antoine

La Bastide Saint Antoine

On the heights of Grasse, forty minutes inland from the Cannes film festival crowds and a different world entirely, a late seventeenth-century Provençal manor rises from five hectares of olive grove, its cream-coloured stone framed by cypress and a thousand-year-old trees that predate the house by centuries. The property has accumulated history at a rate that most hotels can only invent: the English aristocrat John Taylor acquired it in 1864, the Kennedy family spent summers here in the mid-twentieth century, and the impresario Robert Labé later threw garden parties large enough to keep Bill Wyman on the premises for the entirety of 1975. In 1996, Jacques Chibois, who had already spent fifteen years earning two Michelin stars at the Royal Gray restaurant in the Gray d'Albion in Cannes, and his wife Odette bought the bastide, restored it using traditional methods, and opened it as a hotel restaurant. Sixteen rooms and suites are spread across two buildings, the original manor and a later contemporary wing, and the whole property joined Relais & Châteaux in 2000 and received its fifth star in 2009. The original building's rooms wear their age properly: painted wood in the old Provençal pigments, antique furniture, quilted bedspreads, and floors tiled in original eighteenth-century terracotta. The newer wing, a grey and marble counterpoint, runs to private terrace jacuzzis and fireplaces, the two styles co-existing without apology. The restaurant, which is the primary reason most people make the drive up from the coast, holds a Michelin star and membership of Les Grandes Tables du Monde, and its wide terrace looks south toward the Bay of Cannes, the view working as hard as the kitchen. Chibois's cooking is rooted in the Mediterranean larder, deeply regional, technically precise without being showy, and the truffle programme (each January he organises a market with the local growers' union, and black truffle appears on the menu for four months of the year) is taken seriously enough to have become something of an institution in the Alpes-Maritimes. This is a chef's hotel in the most literal sense: the personality that runs through the place belongs to one man, and whether that reads as warmth or narrowness depends on what you are looking for. Chibois is the kind of cook who trained under Roger Vergé and Louis Outhier and then spent decades doing exactly what he wanted, in one place, without pivoting. The food has that quality too, confident rather than restless, rooted in Provence without performing it. The grounds are good for a morning walk, the pool is large enough to matter, and the cooking school and perfume initiation activities are there if you want them, but the hotel does not manufacture reasons to stay busy. The view from the terrace in the early evening, over the lavender and olive to the sea, is the activity. You should not come here if the restaurant is not your reason for the visit, or if a chef-owner hotel with a single dominant sensibility makes you feel you are a guest in someone's house rather than a paying customer in your own. You should come if you want to eat very well two or three times a day, wake up above the Cannes plain rather than on it, and spend time in a property whose character has not been committee-approved. The Chibois version of Provence is not the version sold in the airport shops, and that, more than anything, is the argument for the drive up from the coast. The short version: A seventeen-room Relais & Châteaux bastide on the heights of Grasse, opened by chef Jacques Chibois and his wife Odette in 1996, with a Michelin-starred restaurant, five hectares of ancient olive grove, and views south to the Bay of Cannes.