What Starck kept quiet
The Weill family bought the old Souleias, a tired holiday hotel on a fine piece of hillside, pulled it down and asked Philippe Starck to start again. It opened in June 2019, and for once his hand is calm. The buildings step down a pine-covered slope towards the bay of Cavalaire, pale stone and long horizontals, terraces that hold the sea in front of you and shade behind. Starck took his cue from a daydream of antiquity, columns and pergolas and a certain gravity, though the comfort is entirely of now.
There are forty-four rooms and suites, most of them looking at the water, and the best open straight onto a garden or a private pool. Below runs Gigaro, a five-kilometre arc of soft sand that stays wild at its far end where the Cap Lardier nature reserve begins and the road simply stops. You can walk out of a five-star hotel and into protected coast inside a few minutes, which on this stretch of the Riviera is close to a miracle.
Starck can be loud. Here he chose to get out of the way of the sea.
Health as a pleasure
What sets the place apart is the Shape Club, more than two thousand square metres given over to movement and treatment, with a twenty-five-metre pool and a programme that runs from a gentle detox to a hard sporting week. The idea, and the reason it works, is that none of it feels like punishment. You can come to lose weight or you can come to lie down, and the hotel is fluent in both while pushing neither. A studio session in the morning, a long lunch after, no scolding at either end.
That balance is rare on this coast, where wellness usually means either a token spa bolted to a party hotel or a clinic that treats appetite as the enemy. Lily of the Valley, a member of Leading Hotels of the World, sits in the gap between the two and stays there with some conviction. Saint-Tropez is twenty minutes away when you want it, and easy to forget when you don't.
You can come to lose weight, or come to lie down. The hotel is fluent in both.
What the coast sends up
The kitchen here has a job most kitchens do not, which is to feed people who are watching what they eat without making the watching the point. Vincent Maillard runs it, and he keeps two registers going at once. Vista is the main room, glass-walled above the pines, where the cooking leans Mediterranean and light and refuses to turn eating into a chore. There is a menu built around the house method, counted and considered, and a menu for people who are on holiday and want the rosé. Both are taken seriously, which is the whole trick.
Down on the sand the beach club splits in two. Brigantine is for a proper lunch, with a few Italian accents and a table close enough to the water to hear it. Pépé is the simpler of the pair, feet in the sand, something quick between swims. It is not a hideaway, and we will not pretend it is one in August. Keep to the garden side and the Shape Club rhythm, though, and a large hotel behaves like a much smaller one.
The Riviera is thick with hotels that sell the idea of feeling good and deliver only the look of it. Lily of the Valley reads the coast as a place to feel better rather than only to be seen, and it holds that line without turning stern. Come for the Shape Club and the quiet, take a room on the garden or the sea, and let Saint-Tropez wait its turn.
