Le Clair de la Plume

Le Clair de la Plume

Mornings in Grignan start with coffee at the window, the Château de Grignan and Chartreuse du Val de Bénédiction close enough to walk to before lunch. Le Clair de la Plume is not one building but four, scattered through the village: nine nineteenth-century rooms in the main house, six suites reached by a monumental staircase at the Maison Privée, a single secluded Lovers' Pavilion with its own terrace and a view over the village, and thirteen contemporary rooms at La Ferme Chapouton, where a heated salt pool sits in the grounds. What no other hotel here offers sits three hundred metres away: a natural swimming pool built into an old stone basin, thirteen metres by five, set in a garden of fifteen hundred square metres of lavender and rockrose that gets no chemical treatment at all, pool included. Dinner runs from the Michelin-starred restaurant under the glass roof, its menu shaped with chef Glenn Viel, down to the simpler bistro at Chapouton or a glass at the Café des Vignerons on the village square. Free bicycles cover the hiking trails beyond town, babysitting can be arranged, and a family room exists, though this suits couples and small groups better than a houseful of children expecting a resort pool at the door. Anyone wanting a single building with one reception and one lift should look elsewhere. Here, guests move across the village between their room, dinner, and a swim in water nobody has treated with chlorine, and that, not the Michelin star, is the real distinction. Four buildings scattered through Grignan's village hold Le Clair de la Plume: nineteenth-century rooms, a Lovers' Pavilion, and a Michelin-starred table under glass. Three hundred metres off sits its distinction, a natural stone swimming pool that's never seen chlorine. Better suited to couples than to families chasing a poolside room.