For design
Villa La Coste
Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade · Provence
Villa La Coste sits inside a working vineyard that doubles as one of the most serious art and architecture parks in Europe. You sleep among the work of Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano, with a Louise Bourgeois spider down the hill and the Luberon filling the windows.
The estate is Château La Coste, a few kilometres north of Aix-en-Provence, where an organic wine domaine was turned into a long walk past commissioned buildings and sculpture. The hotel is where you stay inside all of it. Thirty-one suites, several with a private pool, sit low across the slope so the vines and the hills do the talking. Rooms are pale and quiet: stone floors, white linen, a single piece of art on the wall, glass that slides back onto a terrace. Step out early and the art walk is yours before the day visitors arrive, from Ando's concrete chapel and its reflecting pool to a Gehry pavilion and Piano's gallery sunk into the ground, with Goldsworthy and Serra further out among the oaks.
Dinner is Louison, the hotel's restaurant, where Florent Pietravalle took over the kitchen in 2026 from Hélène Darroze. He cooks close to the garden and the season, precise without fuss. The wider estate adds more: Francis Mallmann at his open fires in the Argentine manner, his first kitchen in Europe, and a daytime café-restaurant set inside Ando's Art Centre, the vegetable garden behind it laid out by Louis Benech. The wine is grown on the land you can see from the table.
Plenty of hotels hang a few canvases in the corridor and call it a collection. Here it is the other way round. A biodynamic vineyard and a real sculpture park came first, and the rooms were added so you could stay the night among them. It asks something of you, a willingness to walk and to look closely, which here is the whole point.
