Lie Low at Lilou

The oldest resort on the French Riviera, Hyères has a storied history. A winter retreat for artistic and aristocratic northern Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, after the modernist house Villa Noailles was built in the town in the 1920s, it also became a magnet for France’s avant-garde minds, from Jean Cocteau to Man Ray. Now, it’s experiencing something of a revival, with a 37-room hotel, Lilou, designed by Parisian studio Haddou Dufourcq, cementing its new status.

Set inland, surrounded by pines and with the Mediterranean 4km away, Hyères’ full name, Hyères Les Palmiers, provided the starting point for Haddou Dufourcq’s renovation of the hotel. “It was famous for its mild climate, allowing the acclimatisation of exotic plants,” explains Kim Haddou. “This is one of the only places in France where people still produce plants and cut flowers for the European market, so it’s all about flowers and plants.” Trellis work is a recurring theme throughout – used in an understated white-on-white fashion – “to make people feel like they are in a winter garden,” continues Haddou.

Despite the fact that the building had always been a hotel (it dates from 1890, when it opened to take in the growing influx of tourists) it was a challenge to bring it up to date to suit modern tastes and conveniences. A succession of bad renovations meant that there was almost nothing worth keeping of the existing interior (an archway in the lobby is practically the only survivor). “It was built at a time when there were no bathrooms inside the rooms, so they had been added in each room later, in a really hectic way,” says Florent Dufourcq. “We had to completely change the layout of the rooms to make them as comfortable as possible, even for the smallest rooms. It was also complicated to bring modern technical elements inside an ancient building where nothing was designed for it.”

Rattan, burr poplar and other natural materials, such as the straw wallcovering by Casamance or the guest rooms’ cork flooring, are the recurring palette throughout, contrasted with crisp white and off-white. In the lounge, a pair of Gubi’s curving rattan Bohemian 72 sofas face each other next to a stepped fireplace that references both the 1970s origins of the sofa and Hyères’ art deco heyday. An inviting burr poplar bar is surrounded by rattan stools; here, the trellis motif has been blown up in proportion, and is writ large across the ceiling. The cocktail menu promises “a journey around the Mediterranean basin.”

Haddou Dufourcq also plays with scale elsewhere: the check-in desk has a giant Ingo Maurer paper light hanging above it (there’s another in the lounge area), while in one of the guest rooms there are bulbous, oversized mouldings. Two of the bedrooms have a theatrical Moorish influence, with decorative arched openings: these are Haddou’s favourite spaces as “they face south; you can follow the path of the sun all day long, with its beautiful and warm light.” The Moorish influence is intended by the designers as a sort of bottled memory of early-20th-century aristocracy gone by, who would have travelled to the East as well as to Hyères on their grand tours: a Moorish-style villa, built in the 19th-century in the orientalist style, is also one of the town’s best-known landmarks.

The art deco style, as viewed through a contemporary lens, is also evident in the guest rooms, with their burr poplar writing desks (a bespoke design by Haddou Dufourcq) and the traditional sanitaryware and brassware in the bathrooms.

Outside, Gubi’s fringed Tropique chairs – their breezy informality perfect for a Riviera location – and Azure Confort tables for the restaurant sit under a shady columned pergola, and there’s a pool to cool off in, decorated with specially commissioned frescoes on the walls by young French artist Jacques Merle. Rather than have a permanent chef, hotelier David Pirone is putting a series of guest chefs on yearly rotation, with Emmanuel Perrodin first up, a name intrinsically associated with French Mediterranean cuisine.

There is a direct link with Villa Noailles – now a contemporary art centre – in that the hotel’s art was curated by the villa’s director Jean-Pierre Blanc, an old friend of Pirone. Fourteen emerging and established artists have their work at Lilou, from murals to photographs, sculptures, ceramics and embroidered fabrics. It feels entirely fitting that Lilou should bear the standard for Hyères’ future as a hub for art and creativity, while paying tribute to its past.