If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR207.55), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
Take your time perusing the Château de Vignée ‘menu’: you’ll want to consider what you’d like from its grandly-housed contemporary rooms and suites, cocooning spa, sauna and indoor pool, and elegant riverside grounds. May we recommend the specials: that’s several sittings at the hotel’s starred restaurant by Marius Bosmans, followed by wine tasting at the 13,000-bottle cellar, and perhaps a soothing treatment or two at the spa; and you may wish to add a side helping of forays into the picturesque Ardennes countryside. Et voilà.
Smith Extra
Get this when you book through us:
A glass of champagne for each guest and a 10% discount on 50-minute spa treatments
11am, but flexible, subject to availability. Earliest check-in, 3pm.
Prices
Double rooms from £188.44 (€220), including tax at 6 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of €1.80 per person per night on check-out.
More details
Rates are room-only but you can buy breakfast at the hotel, served in the Bordeaux room, from €35 (and from €15 for a child).
Also
Some ground-floor rooms in the Lesse wing are suitable for those with mobility issues, and one Superior Room is wheelchair-adapted with widened doorways, grab rails in the bathroom and a roll-in shower.
Hotel closed
Château de Vignée is open all year round, but its gastronomic restaurant Arden closes for a two-week holiday each summer (in June or July, but precise dates vary) and select dates in September and December, so you’re advised to check ahead.
At the hotel
Riverside terrace, free WiFi. In rooms: TV, air-conditioning, Nespresso machine, tea-making kit, minibar, free bottled water, bathrobes, and Désirée and Château de Vignée bath products.
Our favourite rooms
This is an estate stay that’s been completely chât-eauverhauled with sleek modernity. Rooms in the main building come with more colour and exuberant touches; for pared-back elegance, you may prefer the rooms in the Lesse wing. For a deck of one’s own looking onto the garden, book a Superior Room. And it’s de rigueur to mention the pied-à-terre charms of the two-bedroom Royal Suite in the eaves.
Poolside
The spa’s indoor pool is a decent size for lengths and sits in a glass-walled annexe where you’ll also find the hammam.
Spa
A modern complex of two treatment rooms, changing areas and lockers, the spa at Château de Vignée also features a hammam and indoor pool. Down a short flight of stairs, there’s also a sauna, with a floor-to-ceiling window that looks onto the river.
Packing tips
This is hunting-shooting-fishing country, so there’s an option to channel gamekeeper-chic via woollen tailoring, statement boots, checks, fine knits and blousey scarves.
Also
In spite of its modern interiors, Château de Vignée has lived a few lives – dating back to the 17th century, during the Second World War it was a field hospital.
Pet‐friendly
Dogs are welcome in selected rooms from €30 a dog, each night, but no pets are allowed at Arden. You can book dog-sitting in advance, from €35 an hour. See more pet-friendly hotels in Rochefort.
Children
An extra bed can be added in most rooms, there’s a two-bedroom suite, and babysitting can be arranged (from €35 an hour, booked ahead). The emphasis on food and wine, however, means you’ll find more couples than families here.
Sustainability efforts
Château de Vignée uses LED bulbs and light sensors to reduce its energy consumption, and has taken steps to reduce single-use plastic. Food miles are held in check by the hotel’s organic kitchen garden and resident beehives. And the Château is a signed-up member of the Trees for Hotels scheme, where guests can skip room-cleaning, and the saved labour is traded in for tree-planting.
Any table secured at Arden is a boon, which is why you should secure your restaurant reservations along with your hotel stay. For sips amid the scenery, take a glass to the riverside terrace.
Dress Code
Finery as befits the finest of dining.
Hotel restaurant
Starred restaurant Arden is the main reason anyone checks in at Château de Vignée – an opportunity to feast on Marius Bosmans’ fêted fare, then retire, sated, to your luxurious lodgings, only steps away. It’s set in a double-height dining room with floor-to-ceiling glass panels at one end, and its contemporary shades-of-taupe decor is designed to let dinner do the talking… We suspect Marius Bosmans may own more than one pair of tweezers, looking at the precision-plated creations that are whisked to cloth-topped tables. Menu titles nod to the chef’s love of terroir (Sweets from the Land, Ardennes treasures), encapsulated in delicate, balanced dishes such as mackerel with strawberry and radish, red gurnard with red pepper and basil, or lamb ‘Quercy’ with carrot and chermoula. The wine pairing, as you’d expect, is in safe hands, with thousands of bottles stashed in the château’s cellar to call upon. Particular highlights of the week are Friday and Saturday night’s six- or seven-course tasting menus. When Arden is closed you can dine at Lounge by Château de Vignée, the hotel’s bistro, which is a barn-like space for enjoying a five-course menu featuring prawn with artichoke, girolles and parmesan, or roasted sea bass with bouillabaisse and fennel.
Hotel bar
Standing in the hotel courtyard, a brick ring (suggesting a fountain) draws the eye: in fact, this is the over-sized skylight above a vast circular table in the château’s wine cellar – an oenophile’s dream of a basement, atmospherically lit with modern moody-hued decor, high chairs at cask-tables, and glass-encased racks of fine wines from around the globe, although predominantly French – all 13,000 of them. Book a sommelier-led wine tasting to sniff, swirl and sip a few cellar highlights.
Last orders
Dine at Arden, Wednesday to Saturday, between 7pm and 8pm, or lunch from noon until 2pm on Thursdays, Fridays and the first Sunday of every month. Lounge by Château de Vignée is open when Arden is not, plus on Saturday evenings.
Room service
Select dishes are available between noon and 10pm.
Close to the French border with Ardennes, Château de Vignée is on the river Lesse just outside Rochefort in south-east Belgium.
Planes
Brussels, just over an hour away by road, is the nearest international airport, and private transfers can be arranged (price on enquiry).
Trains
You’ll need a connection to Namur (there’s a direct link from Brussels-Zuid) to pick up the regional service to Rochefort-Jemelle, which is a 20-minute drive from the château; private transfers can be arranged (price on enquiry).
Automobiles
There’s a carpark at the hotel with free valet parking and paid electric-vehicle charging points.
Other
If helicopter transfers are your preferred option, there’s room to touch down on the estate at the Château.
Worth getting out of bed for
Château de Vignée may lie in Belgium but it’s also in the Ardennes, just 20 minutes by road from the French border, and set in a pastoral playground that continues to draw guests who come here to hunt during the winter season. You’re also in a protected geopark in Rochefort – the Famenne-Ardenne – a status earned by the region’s network of caves, quarries, and megaliths. Visit the millennia-old standing stones (Pierres du Diable) at Forrières, or tour the labyrinthine caves of Han-sur-Lesse, where there’s also a museum dedicated to the area’s prehistory, and a wildlife park, home to brown bears, wolverines and lynxes. Rochefort is home to the archeological ruins of a Roman-Gallo villa at Malagne. And although it’s all about the grapes at your château stay, Rochefort’s Cistercian monks at L’Abbaye de Notre-Dame de Saint Remy are more concerned with cheese and Trappist brews: the abbey is open to the public when there are church services, but if it’s the monastic produce you want to sample, you’ll find it in various bars and delis in Rochefort.
Local restaurants
Refinement goes into the seasonal mer-and-terre cuisine at L’Incontournable in Rochefort so that its plates are as pretty to look at as they are full of flavour, with dishes such as squab pigeon two ways, slow-cooked with rhubarb jus and a candied leg-croquette, or a half-lobster served on saffron risotto with confit bacon and tomato compôte. As the weather allows, tables on the terrace are a favoured spot for lazy summer lunches (Thursday to Sunday only). Benoit and Bernard Dewitte bring their expertise to fine dining at Merlesse, a hotel restaurant in Han-sur-Lesse. Artily-presented plates borrow liberally from cuisines around the world, with mains such as beef tagliata, cod brandade with Belgian caviar, and slow-cooked veal with aubergine, truffle and miso. Quality and terroir inform the Modern European plates at Han-sur-Lesse farmhouse-restaurant L’Ôthentique, an elegant, warmly lit dining room with parquet flooring, comfortable banquettes and a brick-vaulted ceiling. Set menus and à la carte options feature precisely plated dishes such as steak béarnaise, caught-to-order blue trout with vegetable broth, and slow-cooked guinea fowl with cherries, soy sauce and local honey.
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this gastronomic getaway in the Belgian Ardennes and unpacked their beer and cheese, a full account of their stellar culinary adventures will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside Château de Vignée in Rochefort…
Like any seasoned looker, Château de Vignée has quite a past: what began as a 17th-century stronghold prized for its game-rich forests and fields in the Belgian Ardennes has evolved via stints as a field hospital during the Second World War, and a less-glossy hotel, into the overhauled boutique stay you can check into today. Château coated it may be, but this is a thoroughly modern bolthole, sumptuously appointed with polished floors, velvet accents, luxury linens and either neutral or drawn-from-nature colours, with artworks throughout that pay homage to the château’s rural locale. Rooms are split between the main castle and the river-facing Lesse wing across the courtyard, but either way, you’re only steps from the gastronomic highlight that is dinner at Marius Bosmans’ terroir-celebrating restaurant, Arden. Bolstering the hotel’s gourmet appeal is its 13,000-bottle wine cellar. And beyond the estate, a glut of fine-dining spots is tucked into the verdant Ardennes scenery, not least of which are the manifold friteries and trappist breweries that no trip to Belgium is complete without…
