Cheval Blanc St-Tropez (formerly Résidence de la Pinède)

Cheval Blanc St-Tropez (formerly Résidence de la Pinède)

Built in 1936 as a cream, heavily balustraded villa among the umbrella pines of the Plage de la Bouillabaisse, on the western edge of Saint-Tropez where the town opens onto the gulf, La Résidence de la Pinède spent most of its life as the Delion family’s hotel, run by Jean-Claude Delion as one of the more discreet palaces on the Var coast, a fifteen-minute walk along the water from the old port and under an hour’s drive from Toulon-Hyères airport outside of August. LVMH bought it in 2016 and reopened it on 16 May 2019 as Cheval Blanc St-Tropez, the fourth of the group’s Maisons after Courchevel, Randheli and St-Barth, with 30 rooms and suites, exteriors overseen by the Tropezian architect François Vieillecroze, who had shaped the property’s evolution for years, and interiors by Jean-Michel Wilmotte. The house is run by Olivier Raveyre, who was given the job by the Delions in 2007 at twenty-six, having come from the Burj Al Arab and the Ritz in London, and who greets a good number of guests by name because they have been coming back since the Delion years. Wilmotte kept the old bones and stripped back the rest, pale stone, oak, linen, a palette of sand and chalk that leaves the colour to the Mediterranean, which is visible from most rooms (the sea-view duplexes are the ones to ask for). Arnaud Donckele, the Rouen-born chef Delion hired in 2004 on Alain Ducasse’s recommendation, still cooks at La Vague d’Or, which won two Michelin stars in 2010 and a third in 2013, a dinner-only terrace where the menu reads like a map of Provence, Mediterranean fish, wild herbs, vegetables from small local growers, and a wine list weighted toward Bandol and the Côtes de Provence. Thierry di Tullio, in the dining room since 2008, runs service in the old French manner. La Terrasse handles lunch and the easier dinners under the pines, and there is a bar, a Guerlain spa with four treatment rooms, a short private stretch of sand with loungers set close to the water, and bikes and Mini Mokes for the run into town. It feels less like a resort than a private house that happens to have a three-star kitchen, which is roughly how LVMH describes it, and for once the description holds. Thirty rooms means the beach never fills, and service has the polish you would expect from a group that also sells handbags, attentive, anticipatory, occasionally a touch choreographed. The location does a lot of the work: you are close enough to walk to Sénéquier for breakfast, but on the quiet side of town, facing the gulf toward Sainte-Maxime, well away from the Pampelonne beach clubs and the late nights on the quay. The clientele skews toward returning families, couples on long weekends, and the kind of regular who has booked the same room every July for a decade, and the mood is more Riviera classicism than Tropezian excess. You should not come if you want the Saint-Tropez of Club 55 and long lunches that turn into dancing, a large garden to disappear into, or a hotel open year round, since it closes from mid-autumn to spring. The beach is small, the coast road into town runs behind it, and in high summer the traffic is audible. Nor is this a place for a modest budget, the rates are among the highest on the coast and nothing here pretends otherwise. You should come for one dinner at La Vague d’Or, for the luxury of walking to the port and back to a quiet room by the sea, and for the sense, unusual in this town, of a hotel that has been doing the same thing well since 1936. The short version: A 30-room hotel on the Plage de la Bouillabaisse in Saint-Tropez, built in 1936, run for decades by the Delion family and owned by LVMH since 2016, with interiors by Jean-Michel Wilmotte and Arnaud Donckele’s three-Michelin-star La Vague d’Or.