The pink palace at the head of the Sainte-Maxime bay has been closed since 2008. On 24 April, after a restoration that took longer than the original construction, COMO Le Beauvallon reopened — and the Gulf of Saint-Tropez now has the palace it has been quietly missing.
The property was built in 1914 by an English banker, ran for nearly a century as one of the discreet addresses of the coast, and then sat empty for eighteen years while three successive owners tried and failed to make the numbers work. Christina Ong's COMO Hotels took it on in 2021 with the only brief that was ever going to succeed: restore, do not reinvent. The ten acres of terraces, the umbrella pines, the twenty-five-metre pool that opens toward the water, the private pontoon for tenders from the bay — all of it is back. None of it has been flattened into the brand language one had begun to fear.
The rooms — there are sixty-two — read as a careful negotiation between Belle Époque proportion and the COMO instinct for quiet. Pale wood, linen, large bathrooms, no chrome. The suites on the second floor of the main pavilion, with their double doors onto the long balcony, are the booking.
The culinary anchor is the news. Yannick Alléno, the most decorated chef in the Michelin guide, has taken the property's signature restaurant and — significantly — opened Beauvallon Sur Mer, the first beach-club restaurant of his career. It is a small sandy room above the pontoon, designed by Dorothée Delaye, with a menu that pulls Southeast Asian technique through Mediterranean produce. After three decades of Alléno doing the most serious tables in Paris and Courchevel, the decision to do a beach is not casual. It is a statement about where the chef-driven luxury client now wants to spend a Tuesday in July.
For the Gulf — long the quieter, less photographed cousin of the Saint-Tropez peninsula — Beauvallon is the property that resets the map. Sainte-Maxime is six minutes by tender. The peninsula itself is twelve. For the first time in a generation, there is a reason to stay on the north shore of the bay rather than the south.
Book the suites in the main pavilion. Take dinner in the formal room one night, the beach the other. Ask for a tender at eight in the morning.
— Camille Vedy
