How a Provençal farmhouse became a local hotspot

There can be few hotels that, a month after they’ve opened, are fully booked. But such is the reputation of Mas Candille, a charming 46-bedroom hotel half an hour’s drive north of Nice, that on a Monday lunchtime in July the loungers around the pool are packed. The car park is lined with Bentleys, Porsches, and a Lamborghini painted a brave shade of orange. And in the evening, even though the foodie village of Mougins is just a ten-minute stroll away, the restaurant is abuzz with holidaying French families: women in vertiginous heels clinking champagne glasses; cute children in improbably white linen shirts; tanned men contentedly puffing on fat cigars under the moonlit cedars.

That Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger and Christian Dior once lived near this little Provençal bubble, and that Pablo Picasso spent his last days in Mougins, makes perfect sense. This part of the world couldn’t be more idyllic — or French.

The busy-ness of the hotel is partly because it’s been shut for two and a half years for a restoration. Before it closed, the old Provençal farmhouse — or “mas” — was owned by the francophile Englishman Mark Silver, who over 20 years had transformed a run-down traditional building into a much-loved Relais & Châteaux boutique hotel with a Michelin-star restaurant. When Brexit came along, and then Covid, like many Brits abroad the Silvers had to pack up their French home and head home.

Luckily for Mas Candille’s fans, a bunch of talented locals, keen on promoting French heritage and culture, scooped it up: Jean-Philippe Cartier, the CEO of the charming, characterful H8 Collection hotels; Prisca Courtin, of the Clarins family (who created the spa); and a young chef, Romain Antoine, whose stint at Paloma in nearby Mougins helped it to earn two Michelin stars. Add a fashionable young French-Mexican interior designer, Hugo Toro, and a polished general manager who ran the Majestic in Cannes, Nicolas Gachet, and you have a hotshot team.

What they’ve managed to create, after the two-and-a-half-year renovation, is a hotel that has kept the bits people loved but injected a fresh art-deco-meets-California vibe. The lovely old terracotta walls, framed by pistachio shutters, still glow luminously in the setting sunlight, and paths still wind through beautifully landscaped gardens aglow with pink laurel and fragrant with lavender and rosemary. But, inside, the former classic Provençal interiors have been replaced with something much smarter and more international. Alongside traditional olive greens and honey yellows, Toro has introduced lots of American ranch-style colours: burgundies and rusts, dark woods and reds, creating a far more masculine look (in my suite, other than brown and burgundy, the only colours were the creams and muted yellows of carpets and curtains and dark pink marble in the bathroom). The knick-knacks, both new and old, are as international: a Native American drum alongside a carved Mexican bowl; empty glass decanters and inkwells; an African sculpture adjacent to a Balinese-style rattan screen that hides a TV. (Bizarrely, on the wall opposite my bed there was also a full-height mirror — thankfully with a little curtain to pull across it should I not fancy having a face-off with myself at bedtime).

The living spaces in the communal areas, though, are rich with local character. In the main farmhouse — which has 21 rooms, including the charming Room 214, with a giant balcony on which to suntan or star-watch — the cosy bar/restaurant is decorated with local art and dried flowers. Some pieces are arranged in green-ceramic frames from the village of Vallauris, others are lit by glass lanterns blown nearby in Biot. With its warm tones of burgundies, browns and greens — including the green ceramic-surround fireplace which has been there for over a century — this will be the spot to be in winter, when it opens as Antoine’s main gastro-restaurant.

Until then, the talented chef’s young team is based at the pool restaurant, with views over the twinkling lights of Grasse and wooded hills beyond. For lunch, he presents old favourites: guacamole with homemade biscuits; burrata on slices of tomato sweet and rich with sunshine; violet-hued artichokes scattered with parmesan and hazelnuts (all, of course, served with hunks of delicious bread and mountains of salted butter). And for dinner, on rattan chairs under the moon, staff deliver richly flavoured plates: fire-grilled chicken glossy with sweet, thyme-scented jus; herb-strewn rich lobster pasta; generously portioned truffle risotto — all accompanied by the sorts of fine wines you expect in a five-star hotspot off the Cote d’Azur.

The spa, which has been transformed by the Clarins family, is as compelling as the food. Beside a generous 25m part-indoor, part-outdoor pool, surrounded by loungers and parasols, is a Kneipp pool to cool down on sweltering days, and a little sauna and steam-room for wintery days. And in four treatment rooms, featuring their own well-planted verandas, Clarins therapists deliver treatments using the brand’s own plant-based products (including one called Glow, specifically created for the hotel, that really does live up to its name).

Lisa Grainger