Hotel Villa Cosy

Hotel Villa Cosy

Down the Chemin de la Belle Isnarde, ten minutes on foot from the Place des Lices, where Saint-Tropez gives way to garden walls and a few rows of vines, Villa Cosy is a five-star hotel of nine rooms and fifteen suites set around a pool heated all year, plus Villa Eucléia, a 450-square-metre Provençal house of seven bedrooms added among the vines in 2022, which brings the total to 25 keys. It started out at guesthouse scale, closer to a dozen rooms, and has grown slowly under the same owners, Frédéric and Diane Saveuse, a husband and wife who collect mid-century design, turn up with their children at the town’s classical concerts, and are the reason returning guests talk about names more than facilities. The latest change is the architect François Vieillecroze, whose Riviera work includes Lou Pinet and Cheval Blanc St-Tropez, brought in to refine the estate without changing its size. Every room has a private terrace facing the pool or the vines, and every room holds one original piece from the owners’ collection of 1950s and 1960s furniture, Charlotte Perriand, Arne Jacobsen, Verner Panton, Eero Saarinen, the Eameses, alongside contemporary work by Joseph Klibansky, Yaniv Edery and Richard Orlinski, whose faceted animals will amuse some guests and not others. The Riviera Suite runs to 120 square metres, among the largest in town. There is no restaurant, a choice the Saveuses make to keep outside diners off the property, so breakfast is served at any hour, room service runs around the clock (truffle risotto, roast octopus, pinsa), and the residents-only Cosy Bar opens onto a cellar of more than 1,000 bottles, with over thirty champagnes and a red from the estate’s own vines that is poured nowhere else. The olive oil on the table comes from the garden’s trees, bottled as O by Villa Cosy. The Spa by Sothys has two treatment rooms, a hammam and a sauna, and an outdoor hot tub is heated year-round. Villa Eucléia adds a La Cornue kitchen, a cinema, a counter-current pool, and a butler and housekeeper. Staying here feels like a well-run private house. You spend the day in town or at the port, come back through the gate, and the noise drops away, and the rest of the day happens around the pool and on your own terrace. Staff are known for saying yes, the owners are around, and it was the first hotel in Saint-Tropez to earn Clef Verte certification. It is also open all year, which is rare on the peninsula, and it may be at its best out of season, when Saint-Tropez becomes a market town again and the pool is still warm. The interiors are polished in a familiar international five-star way, more pale stone and sunloungers than Provençal farmhouse, so the design pieces carry more character than the architecture. In August the pool-facing terraces look across at one another, so privacy is relative. You should not come if you want the sea from your bed, a beach club at the door, or a hotel dining room to dress for, because the nearest sand is a walk away and every dinner is either in your room or in town. You should come for a quiet, owner-run base within walking distance of everything, with a cellar, a heated pool and a room-service menu good enough that staying in becomes a real choice. The short version: A 25-room, five-star hotel ten minutes’ walk from the Place des Lices in Saint-Tropez, owned and run by Frédéric and Diane Saveuse, with a pool heated all year, a cellar of more than 1,000 bottles, original mid-century furniture in every room, and no restaurant by choice.