L'Hotel Les Ateliers de l'Image

Class: First

Style: Modern design

Rooms: 32

Once the town’s cinema and music hall, Les Ateliers de l’Image has evolved into a gallery, a photography workshop, and a laboratory—and now, the newest addition, a 32-room hotel. The location is quite obviously inspiring and photogenic—St. Rémy de Provence is, as they say, a stone’s throw from the landscapes that inspired Van Gogh (yes, we know he wasn’t a photographer, but the point still stands). And the same can be said for the hotel, a beautiful exercise in a sort of rustic country minimalism, with lots of blonde wood and glasswork and a refreshing absence of antique anything.

Perhaps to subtly reinforce the vaguely Zen simplicity of the décor, the restaurant serves a hybrid Japanese/French cuisine, set on the terrace with a view of the gardens and the Alpilles beyond. The bar serves drinks inside the town’s old screening room, while screening the classics on DVD—and the gardens come complete with a labyrinth for re-enacting your favorite Last Year at Marienbad moment, if you can remember one (though, presumably, using the lawns to act out the rabbit-hunting scene from Renoir’s Rules of the Game would be frowned upon).

Then again if you get to that point, you may be asked to take it upstairs—many rooms come with DVD players, and all with essentials like internet access and smart high-tech bathrooms. The most delightful of the suites is the Treehouse, connected by gangplank to the hotel proper and constructed atop one of the property’s huge plane trees—but even the humblest double rooms bear our whole-hearted endorsement. Definitely worth seeing.