A Belle Epoque Palace that is a mix of private home, despite its grand size and art hub

On the quiet side of the Gulf of Saint Tropez, a century old estate reopens with a 300-piece art collection at its heart and a beach club that once counted Audrey Hepburn among its regulars.

We were lucky enough to be staying at COMO Le Beauvallon this spring, on the quiet side of the Gulf of Saint Tropez. There is a particular kind of Riviera hotel that you find along the azur coastline, but none with that amount of art and design pieces. It sits across the water, close enough to watch the lights of Saint Tropez flicker on at dusk, far enough to never have to hear them.

Built in 1914 as Le Golf Hotel, it spent its early decades collecting the kind of guest list that reads like a table of contents for the twentieth century: Winston Churchill, Colette, and, in the years when the gulf still felt undiscovered, a young Audrey Hepburn, stretched out on its beach in a way that now looks less like leisure than like the invention of a lifestyle.

The hotel disappeared for a while, as the good ones sometimes do. Closed in 2008 for restoration, run quietly as a private estate from 2015, it kept its ten acres of pine and lawn to itself while Saint Tropez across the bay grew louder. This spring, under COMO Hotels and Resorts, it reopened, and the eight minute boat ride from its private jetty to the harbour suddenly became one of the more coveted commutes on the coast.

An Estate Built Around a Collection, Not the Other Way Around

The obvious story here is the setting: a hillside estate of palms and rolling lawn, forty-two rooms and suites, a Belle Epoque silhouette restored rather than reinvented. But spend a night at COMO Le Beauvallon and the setting quickly becomes the frame for something else. Christina Ong, the founder of COMO Group and the estate’s de facto curator, has placed more than three hundred works of contemporary art, sculpture, and rare objects across the property, and the effect is less of a hotel with art in it than of a private collection that happens to also serve breakfast.

When you enter, a monumental installation by the Chinese sculptor Zheng Lu anchors the lobby lounge, its liquid metal form catching the light differently depending on the hour. Elsewhere, pieces attributed to the artist Li Jiwei bring a quieter, more meditative register into the rooms, a counterweight to the estate’s Belle Epoque bones.

Nearly every sightline holds something. A ceramic here, a bronze there, a canvas positioned exactly where the afternoon light will find it.

The most startling piece is architectural rather than sculptural: the original 2002 Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion by the shore, designed by the Pritzker Prize winning architect Toyo Ito, was relocated piece by piece from London and rebuilt in the bay side gardens, where it now sits suspended between sea and sky, a favoured backdrop for weddings and the occasional very well dressed dinner.

Ong’s approach to collecting has always been personal rather than institutional, and it shows here in the way the works are allowed to breathe. Nothing feels acquired to fill a wall. It feels lived with.

The Beach Club, Rebuilt for the Way People Actually Spend Their Days Now

If the art collection is the hotel’s mind, the beach club is unmistakably its body. Beauvallon Sur Mer, redesigned this summer by the French interior designer Dorothée Delaye, sits directly on the shoreline at the base of the estate, and it is the part of COMO Le Beauvallon that most directly inherits the property’s old reputation as a place where people came specifically to be looked at while doing nothing at all.

Delaye’s redesign leans into that history rather than away from it. Fluid wrought iron curves, yacht inflected marquetry, and sun-bleached Riviera colour give the space a 1950s ease that reads as considered rather than nostalgic. A twenty-five metre mosaic pool, reserved for hotel guests, sits beside a sandy sun lounging stretch with direct beach access, while the restaurant above it, chef Yannick Alléno‘s first ever beach club concept, keeps the crowd happy on a menu that moves fluidly between the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.

It is easy, sitting on one of those sunbeds with the gulf in front of you and the village a boat ride away, to understand why Hepburn kept coming back. The beach club has changed considerably since her afternoons here, but the basic proposition, a stretch of private shoreline just far enough from the noise, has not changed at all.

Eight Minutes to Saint Tropez, and No Reason to Rush

The COMO speedboat that ferries guests to the harbour in eight minutes flat is, in its way, the cleverest thing about this hotel. It removes the usual Riviera tension between wanting the scene and wanting distance from it. Dinner in the village is eight minutes away. So is the boutique browsing, the aperitivo crowd, the market. But the estate itself, tucked into its own park on the gulf, asks for none of that noise if you would rather stay. Most evenings, watching the light change over the water from the terrace, we did not take the boat at all.

COMO Le Beauvallon does not try to out shout Saint Tropez. It does not need to. It simply sits across the water, keeps its art close, redesigns its beach club every so often, and waits for people to remember why the gulf side of the bay was always the better address.