Hotel de Paris Saint Tropez

Hotel de Paris Saint Tropez

Most people arrive at the Hôtel de Paris on foot, since its pale façade faces the Place de la Gendarmerie at the entrance to Saint-Tropez, a few minutes’ walk from both the Vieux Port and the plane trees of the Place des Lices, and roughly an hour and a half by road from Nice Côte d’Azur airport when the single road onto the peninsula behaves, a good deal longer in August when it doesn’t. The hotel was Augustine Aubour’s idea. With her husband Marcelin she ran the Bar du Littoral at the village entrance from 1925, looked at the empty plot opposite, began building in 1930 and opened in 1931, naming the place for the Parisians who had started coming south. An extra floor went on in the 1950s, bringing it to 70 rooms and the village’s first air conditioning, and over the decades that followed Colette, Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau and Brigitte Bardot all passed through, while the hotel restaurant, Leï Mouscardins under chef René Goujon, was known for its bouillabaisse and Grand Marnier soufflé. Goujon died in 1976, Augustine in 1992, and the hotel closed with her and stood empty for twenty years until the family of Claude Dray, a businessman and serious collector of modern art who did not live to see it finished, rebuilt it under the Saint-Tropez architect François Vieillecroze and reopened it in February 2013, with 52 rooms and 38 suites set around a planted inner patio. The Drays still own it, and run it as something close to an extension of their collecting, with rotating exhibitions in the public spaces and a monthly literary salon, Conversations with Agnès, held here since 2016. The interiors are by Sybille de Margerie, who describes her brief to herself as bright colour, graphic lines and natural materials, and it shows from the door, where a chandelier made by her studio, SM Design, hangs in the lobby as 3,500 ivory aluminium petals. Above it, on the roof, the pool has a glass floor suspended fifteen metres over the atrium, so that from the lobby you look up through water at swimmers, which is the building’s one real architectural flourish and the thing everyone remembers. Rooms run from compact Classiques facing the street or courtyard to top-floor suites with terraces looking over the rooftops to the harbour, and the Garden Suites, at 46 square metres with their own terraces, are the ones to ask about. Food is spread across four places: Les Toits, the rooftop restaurant and lounge bar, with live music and a sunset crowd; Le Pationata in the patio, where chef David Ignoffo cooks Sicilian; L’Atrium, a champagne bar off the lobby; and La Serena, the hotel’s beach club on Pampelonne in neighbouring Ramatuelle, with a small boutique from Sunday Saint-Tropez, the local family label that has been making linen and silk summer clothes since the 1980s. There is a Spa by Clarins downstairs, and the whole operation is seasonal, with the restaurants and beach closing over winter. This is a town hotel, and the town is the reason to stay. You walk out of the door into the village, to the Tuesday and Saturday market on the Place des Lices, to dinner on the port, to the Musée de l’Annonciade, and you walk back without anyone needing to fetch a car. At 90 rooms it is large by boutique standards and it behaves like it, with a lobby that functions as a social space, a rooftop that fills with non-residents on summer evenings, and the kind of polished, slightly glossy service that comes with Virtuoso and Preferred affiliations. The design is confident and colourful, a statement lobby and a lot of brass and lacquer, not the considered editorial restraint some readers will want from a hotel with this much history, though it is done with conviction and the art on the walls is chosen by people who know what they are looking at. The history itself is mostly told rather than felt, since the 2013 rebuild was thorough, and what remains of 1931 is the address, the proportions of the façade and the stories. You should not come if you want the sea outside your window, since most rooms look onto the street or the courtyard and the beach is a drive away in Ramatuelle, nor if you want silence on a July night, when the rooftop is busy and the village is louder still, nor if your idea of the Riviera is a hillside estate with a long drive and a gate. You should come if you want to live in Saint-Tropez for a few days, on foot, with a pool, a beach club and a decent dinner all within the hotel’s reach, and if you would rather spend your evenings in the village than looking at it from a terrace above the bay. The short version: A 90-room hotel on the Place de la Gendarmerie in Saint-Tropez, opened in 1931 by the Aubour family and rebuilt by the Dray family in 2013, with interiors by Sybille de Margerie, a glass-bottomed rooftop pool and its own beach club on Pampelonne.