La Bastide des Salins, Saint-Tropez

La Bastide des Salins, Saint-Tropez

On the Route des Salins, a little under four kilometres east of the old port of Saint-Tropez, on the stretch of the peninsula that runs out towards the Pointe des Salins, a tall gate opens onto a long drive and a Provençal bastide with blue shutters, set in a hectare of parkland planted with palms, plane trees and less expected exotic species, the house surfacing slowly from the greenery as you approach. It is a four-star hotel of fourteen rooms, four of them suites, open each year from mid-April to late September, around fifty minutes from Toulon-Hyères airport and an hour and a half from Nice Côte d’Azur on a clear road, which in July and August it rarely is. The owner, a Saint-Tropez loyalist, bought the house in 2016 and turned it into a hotel without much fuss or pretension, and it still runs like the holiday house of a family with good taste and a small, attentive team. The rooms are done in pale, sun-washed tones, comfortable and recently renovated, many of them opening straight onto the garden, and the suites, between 45 and 55 square metres, have a separate sitting room, a bathroom with both bath and shower, and a large private terrace. This is not the kind of considered editorial interior you might find at one of the newer addresses in the village, but the rooms are light and well kept, and the park does most of the work. There is no restaurant, which is worth knowing before you arrive: breakfast is a buffet served on the terrace beside the heated pool, and later in the day the bar sends boards of cheese and charcuterie out to the small seating areas scattered through the garden. Facing the pool is a Japanese garden, an odd and rather lovely choice for a Provençal house, and the practical details are covered, with a small fitness room, bicycles to rent, electric car charging, and a free shuttle into town. Staying here feels less like checking into a Saint-Tropez hotel than borrowing a friend’s house on the edge of it. The days organise themselves around the pool, the shade of the plane trees and the ten-minute walk down to the Plage des Salins, one of the few beaches on the peninsula sheltered from the wind, with its two beach restaurants and a far quieter crowd than Pampelonne, while the smaller cove at La Moutte is a short walk further. Town is close enough for dinner and far enough that you never hear it. It suits couples who have done the port and the beach clubs and want Saint-Tropez on calmer terms, and families who need a suite and a garden more than a scene. You should not come if you want a destination restaurant on site, a spa, sea views from your bed, or the theatre of a big Saint-Tropez hotel, as there is none of that here. You should come for a hectare of shade, a heated pool shared with at most a couple of dozen other guests, mornings that start in the garden and end on the sand at Les Salins, and the rare feeling, this close to Saint-Tropez in August, of being somewhere private. The short version: A fourteen-room Provençal bastide on the Route des Salins, four kilometres east of Saint-Tropez’s port, set in a hectare of park with a heated pool and Japanese garden, no restaurant, and a ten-minute walk to the wind-sheltered Plage des Salins.