Hotel description

If the South of France, for you, is simply shorthand for Provence and the Riviera, then there’s another world you’re missing out on. Not the vibrant old sailors’ city of Marseille — though you should make sure you see that too — but the classical-Rome meets cosmopolitan-multicultural town of Montpellier, the capital of Languedoc, and home to a charming little hotel called the Baudon de Mauny.

They might quibble with that terminology, but in English, a place like this is somewhere between a hotel and a bed and breakfast, and bed and breakfast doesn’t really do it justice. Just five suites in an 18th-century townhouse down an unassuming side street, Baudon de Mauny is a tiny oasis of intimate modern luxury; while the atmosphere is classic, chintz and antiques are kept to an absolute minimum. It’s an organic evolution of a century-old style, not a replica, nor a total revolution — electronics aside, the idea of luxury remains virtually unchanged over the centuries.

The only major caveat is that there’s no restaurant. All right, you win, it’s a bed and breakfast. But what a breakfast it is—and out there in town there’s no shortage of fine food, from the expected (and excellent) South-of-France fare to the newer influences of North Africa.