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The dilemma in planning an escape to this particular stretch of the Saint-Tropez peninsula is usually deciding whether you want hills and vineyards or the sea. At La Croix-Valmer you don’t have to choose. Château de Valmer sits inland, between its own vines and gardens, and La Pinède Plage, its sister hotel, sits directly on Gigaro beach four hundred metres away. Stay at either and you get both. There is a complimentary shuttle between the two properties, though it’s just a ten minute walk along gorgeous vineyards and palm-lined trails, and we nearly always walked it.
We slept at the Château, a former family house turned five-star hotel, and spent every day down at the sea. Both properties have pools and we only really used the one at the beach, right on the water. It was very windy the week we were there, so we stayed in the small pool while our son floated around collecting the pine needles that had dropped from the towering pines onto the surface of the water, which occupied him for longer than anything we could have planned. We ate breakfast down there most mornings too. The breakfast up at the Château is the more generous of the two and worth doing once, but we wanted to be on the sea and that decided it.
Lunch at the beach restaurant is the meal I would come back for. Raw shrimp, shaved artichoke salad, red squid pasta, wild prawns with candied lemon, all of it accompanied by a crisp rosé, and both properties pour the estate’s own very limited production. The prawns are the thing to order, so much so we ordered them twice.
What ties the two ends of the property together is the garden. The vegetables come down to the beach from the Château’s kitchen garden, so even with your feet in the sand you are eating from the estate. At the bistro our first night we shared a zucchini stuffed with veal and rice, and a tomato so good I am still thinking about it.
On our second night we experienced the Michelin-starred menu up at the Château, six courses that open with a plate of thirty-odd things pulled from that same garden and plated with great precision. It was a meal so memorable we’ve written it up separately.
Land and sea, vines and sand, one dinner casual and the next one starred, all within a ten minute walk. We have not found many places on this coast that can do both properly.
A few practical things: Gigaro stays under the radar unless you know to look for it, which is a rare thing here. The beach club is simple, and the beach is white sand rather than the rock you get along so much of the Riviera. The more rustic Provençal restaurants up in the hills are close by, and Saint-Tropez is a short drive when you want it for the day, which is exactly the right distance from Saint-Tropez.
Note: Château de Valmer and La Pinède Plage provided support for the reporting of this story.