Provence, France

La Maison sur la Sorgue

Price per night from$424.85

Price information

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 (EUR390.91), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Well-travelled townhouse

Setting

Waterside brocante market

Boutique hotel La Maison sur la Sorgue is a side-street sanctuary off a busy square in the charming southern French town of L’Isle sur la Sorgue. The globe-trotting owners, Frederic and Marie-Claude, have decorated this hideaway with mementos from their adventures, turning a restored old mansion into an airy expanse with Asian accents.

Smith Extra

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A cheese and wine tasting

Facilities

Photos La Maison sur la Sorgue facilities

Need to know

Rooms

Four, including two suites.

Check–Out

Noon, but flexible, subject to availability. Earliest check-in, 3.30pm.

Prices

Double rooms from £367.45 (€430), including tax at 10 per cent.

More details

Rates include breakfast.

Also

The hotel has a little art gallery and shop called Retour de Voyage, where you’ll be able to buy tables and trinkets picked up around the world by the owners. Artist talks are held in house too.

At the hotel

Boutique, CD, DVD and book libraries, and free WiFi throughout. In rooms: flatscreen TV, CD, Esprit de France toiletries.

Our favourite rooms

Chambre à la Loggia is spacious and loft-like, with deep-crimson walls and a huge private terrace overlooking the gardens and market square. Just down the steps, book the Suite of Shadows for spectacular light effects involving the shutters at sunset. And for the best bathroom, pick Room with a View; it has an antique roll-top bath, wood panelling and a pretty vista of an 18th-century chapel.

Poolside

There's a wood-decked outdoor pool in the tiny, leafy courtyard.

Packing tips

Your wanderlust and inner interior designer – this place will make you want to globetrot and gather for your own home.

Also

In-room beauty treatments can be arranged.

Children

Cots (€25 a day, for under-2s; €80 a day for older kids) can be added to all rooms and suites. The €25 charge applies if they share a parent's bed, too. Up to two extra beds (€80 a day, for each guest) can be added to the Suite of Shadows.

Food and Drink

Photos La Maison sur la Sorgue food and drink

Top Table

Poolside, beneath the sycamore tree in the garden.

Dress Code

Well-travelled, informal chic.

Hotel restaurant

There’s no restaurant, but the hotel can arrange for a local chef to prepare dinner for small groups. Breakfast is served in the ground-floor dining room or in the garden, between 8.30am and 10.30am.

Hotel bar

Drinks are served downstairs on request, where a carefully curated soundtrack flits from classical and jazz to George Michael (in a good way).

Location

Photos La Maison sur la Sorgue location
Address
La Maison sur la Sorgue
6 rue Rose Goudard
L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue
84800
France

Planes

The nearest airports are Marseille (90km) and Avignon (20km). British Airways (www.ba.com) flies to Marseille from London Gatwick; Flybe (www.flybe.com) will get you to Avignon from regional airports in the UK, including Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester.

Trains

The TGV service will get you from Paris to Avignon in under three hours. The station is 25km from L’Isle sur la Sorgue.

Automobiles

Valet parking must be booked before you arrive, it'll set you back €25 a day. It’ll take around 30 minutes to drive from Avignon, via the N7 and D900.

Worth getting out of bed for

Isle, as locals abbreviate it, is a major antiques centre, famed for its top-drawer (and pricey) brocante; dealers flock to the market on Sundays, and shops are open round the week. Shipping can be arranged. The hotel can arrange classic-car tours around the area, taking in the lavender fields and nougat factory in Sault, and a stop to taste goat’s cheese in Banon. There’s a terrific market in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue every Thursday and Sunday morning – go early, do the rounds. Due north are celebrated wine villages such as Vacqueyras, Gigondas and Beaumes de Venise. If you'd like to get a little more active, take a one-hour kayak tour from Fontaine-de-Vaucluse to L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.

Local restaurants

Minutes from the hotel, Café Fleurs (+33 (0)4 90 20 66 94) on Rue Théodore Aubanel is a pretty, elegant lunch spot with plenty of shady outdoor seating. Restaurant Le Vivier showcases excellent local produce in accomplished tasting menus, starring dishes such as mackerel with yuzu and pigeon pie with foie gras. For marvellous menus set by Daniel Hébet, head to Le Jardin du Quai on Avenue Julien Guigue (+33 (0)4 90 20 14 98). It’s charming inside but, in the summer months, try to book a table in the flower-filled garden. Finally, find holiday treatsville at Gelateria Isabella (+33 (0)4 90 20 85 42) on Esplanade Robert Vasse, which makes all comers happy with enormous portions of home-made ice-cream and sorbet.

Local cafés

Stop for a treat at Jouvaud pâtisserie (+33 (0)4 90 63 15 38), 40 rue de Bishopric, in Carpentras, which is so amazing it has a branch in Tokyo, it also now has a shop at 5 Avenue des Quatre Otages, selling Insta-ready cakes with poached pears and salted caramel, crème anglaise and raspberries, praline and passionfruit, and other tasty fillings – plus dainty petits fours.

Local bars

Just minutes from the hotel, Café Fleurs (+33 (0)4 90 20 66 94) on Rue Théodore Aubanel is a pretty and elegant lunch spot with plenty of shady seats outside. Café de France (+33 (0)4 90 38 01 45) on Place de la Liberté is where to go for a drink in the evening to sit and watch the world. Save room for pudding from Isabella Gelateria (+33 (0)4 90 20 85 42) on Esplanade Robert Vasse – enormous portions of home-made ice-creams and sorbets. Brimming with bottles, and with a smattering of outdoor tables, 17 Place aux Vins (17 Rue Rose Goudard) is a lively place to pass an evening in.

Reviews

Photos La Maison sur la Sorgue reviews
Valérie  Abecassis

Anonymous review

By Valérie Abecassis, Style spotter

This review is taken from our guidebook, Mr & Mrs Smith Hotel Collection: France.

 

My husband is a strong contender for ‘Most Stereotypical Parisian of the Year’. He can’t stand the countryside, he detests the South of France, and he’d rather spend a week trapped in a lift than amble around the villages of Provence. There’s no tribal-regional-football reason behind this; he doesn’t even like soccer. No, he just claims that, the minute you leave the capital, the heat is oppressive, the local markets are absurd, and the houses look rather on the old side. He’s a bit of a one, my husband. So it is with a certain sadistic joy that I ask him to accompany me to La Maison sur la Sorgue, a ravishing hôtel particulier located in one of the most attractive market towns in the South of France, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.

We’re in the heart of things, which isn’t at all a bad place to seek relaxation and romance. The town square and its baroque church are virtually on our doorstep so, when the mood takes us, we can nip out to sit on a sunny café terrace with a coffee and Le Monde. And, let’s face it: for out-and-out urbanites, it’s vital to be somewhere; in France, the middle of nowhere means just that.

We’re no more than a 25-minute drive from Avignon TGV station, itself two and a half hours from Paris, but we’re deep in prime husband-riling holiday territory, a part of France where grapes, olives and lavender are cash crops, and second-homers are a fact of life for locals. And here’s this pretty little island, where the pace is slow and the air is warm, with plane trees doing an admirable job of providing shade when the heat gets a bit much.

This charismatic region, to the east of the river Rhône and the papal city of Avignon, is still sometimes known by its historic name of Comtat Venaissin, and L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue has been called its Venice. The town was built on piles driven into marshland during the 12th century, and it is criss-crossed by canals. Venice it ain’t, before your expectations mushroom, but it is lovely, its streets charmingly skew-whiff and its stone-built houses solid and attractive. The River Sorgue meanders lazily here and there, going underground and re-emerging, and turning massive, mossy waterwheels as it flows.

It’s not easy pulling off a truly excellent maison d’hôte – guests should feel perfectly at home, but it must offer a degree of elegance that puts their own abode just slightly in the shade. The achievement of La Maison sur la Sorgue’s proprietors, Frédéric and Marie-Claude, is remarkable. They took on the property in 2002 and opened house in 2006, after extensive works. There are just four suites, each vast and subtle in style. I’m not keen on over-complicated, artificial deco or low-lit loungey retro, so I’m in the right hotel. In terms of interiors, fashion, design, I crave simplicity, originality, integrity and craftsmanship – the values Frédéric and Marie-Claude seem to have written into their design credo.

Via the magnificent, heavy wooden door, you enter a splendid residence, whose white stone walls act like gallery space for a collection of finds from all over Asia: dark-wood furniture, decorative chests, Buddhas. It’s beautifully and unpretentiously put together. Through the picture windows, we make out the courtyard, shaded by a great plane tree, with laurels, pots of aromatic herbs, a teak swimming pool and an artful smattering of wrought-iron garden furniture. Back in the luminous kitchen/dining room, on a big tiled worktop near the enviable black Lacanche stove, stands an immense platter of hazelnuts and walnuts and – twinkling at us by way of greeting – two glasses of Côtes du Rhône. My husband abandons his wariness of the warm south and lets the hospitable welcome melt away his Parisian tension.

Our room, Chambre à la Loggia, has theatrical red walls, sisal-type flooring, a superbly big bed and, instead of a TV, shelves of Murakami novels; we also find a music system in a little carved-wood wardrobe, not to mention CDs by Pink Floyd and their psychedelic ilk (did I mention that my husband is a card-carrying old hippie?). The suite opens onto a terrace decked out with sofas and an inviting day-bed; we’re delighted by so many opportunities to take things lying down. In the morning, it’s Fr´´déric who mans the stove, serving us a fine breakfast – fresh melon and strawberries, scrambled eggs, home-made pannacotta – on refined white porcelain. He was a Parisian in a former life, until he joined his wife, a Vaucluse native, to breathe contemporary chic into Isle’s accommodation offering. They’ve even rethought the old épicerie that belongs to La Maison sur la Sorgue, piling it with an ever-changing stock of statues from Thailand, hand-blown glass lamps and other objets trouvées and trinkets. Retour de Voyage is not your usual hotel boutique.

As far as the rest of the local shops go, L’Isle just happens to be the third most important world hub for vintage furniture and brocante finds, with treasures from every era, including the old-hippie years of the Sixties and Seventies. There are 12 permanent markets and 40 boutiques, and up to 300 dealers crowding in at weekends. We aren’t in materialistic mood, so we take a drive out to Velleron, a village known for its farmer’s markets; and further on to Gordes, a perched settlement with protected status. To avoid the tapenade shops and save our ankles from mediaeval cobbles, we repair immediately to a locals’ café with three outdoor tables. Here, we look up at the sky and down at the Luberon valley, and surrender to wine, foie gras and the inimitable pleasures of French country living. Back at La Maison sur la Sorgue, we sprawl on our terrace, warmed by the sun, the wine, the freedom. And – can it really be? – my husband’s eyes seem a little mournful as he checks the Avignon–Paris return tickets are in order for the morning.

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Price per night from $424.85