The inn where the artists paid in paintings.
Some hotels hang prints in the corridor. At La Colombe d’Or a Léger faces you at breakfast and a Calder turns slowly above the pool. In the lean years between the wars the painters of the coast — Picasso, Miró, Braque — settled their bills with canvases, and the family never sold a single one. The result is a village inn with the wall-power of a small museum and the manners of a friend’s house.
The rooms are few and deliberately plain: terracotta floors, white walls, shutters thrown open onto fig trees. You do not come for the marble bathroom. You come for the terrace, where the same families have eaten the same loup grillé under the same fig tree for three generations.
The table
Lunch is the thing — the famous hors-d’œuvre trolley, a glass of cold Bandol rosé, the long Provençal afternoon. Book the terrace and surrender the rest of the day. See our Riviera table guide.
Getting there
Saint-Paul-de-Vence is twenty-five minutes inland from Nice, hung on its ridge above the orange groves. Come by car and arrive before noon, when the village is still its own. See also our Riviera in three days.
“A working museum where you are allowed to spend the night. Come for lunch; stay because you cannot bear to leave.”
