![]() “There’s no competition on the walls, and there’s no competition between the people whoĬome for a nice, quiet time,” Danièle continues. Hotel - François Truffaut and James Baldwin in the old days, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Bono today. “Very often,” she says, “people say they feel at home here, whether they’re known ones or unknown ones.” The known ones, of course, have always been a part of the It was thus up to the flame-haired Danièle, who has spent a good deal of the last four decades working the front desk, to explain the mythic Like his hotel, François is friendly and unassuming but averse to attention. That was nearly 40 years ago.Ī mobile by Alexander Calder. She met François at the Café de la Place, just across from La Colombe. “I think the mentality of the Hôtel du Cap is that they need to have enormous luxury and services, which some American people love,” explains Danièle, who came to paint in St. Transformed the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in nearby Antibes - which famously used to accept payment only by cash or bank transfer - into something of a Mediterranean Bellagio. Reservations must be made over the phone or requested in writing, and the Roux family has resisted the type of promotion that has La Colombe d’Or prides itself on a discretion decidedly unusual for the South of France. ![]() “La Colombe is for my son.” That son was Francis, who took over in 1953 with his wife, Yvonne Paul’s grandson François, who assumed the reins in 2000, runs it with his wife, Danièle,Ī former actress and an artist in her own right. He sent the prospective buyer a bouquet of flowers and a nice note: “These flowers are for you,” In the 1930s, a rich American tried to buy the hotel, but Roux, a paysan by birth, would have none of it. Credit Clockwise from left: Céline Clanet Jacques Gomot (3) Read: “Ici on loge à cheval, à pied ou en peinture.” (Roughly translated: Here we lodge those on foot, on horseback or with paintings.)Ĭlockwise from left: La Colombe’s owners, François and Danièle Roux the film director François Truffaut (right, holding a jacket) with friends in 1959 actor and singer Yves Montand jumping into the pool in front of a mosaic by Braque Marc Chagall in the early 1980s. Roux had no formal training, but he began to developĪn eye for the art he saw some of his more illustrious guests like Picasso and Chagall creating on his premises, and so he offered artists free accommodation in exchange for work. Roux befriended struggling artists like Léger and Braque, who were drawn to the secluded informality of La Colombe. During the war, many Modernist painters and writers fled Paris and found In World War I, Paul Roux, a local Provençal farmer, opened a restaurant and a small three-room inn in the sleepy village of Saint Paul de Vence. La Colombe is not the only hotel with an art collection, but it may be the only hotel whose existence is a function of its collection, and whose collection is a chronicle of its existence. These playful masterpieces - each an homage to the transformation of color by light - are on as equal a footing with each other as they are, in a sense, with you. Outside, a giant Calder mobile dances over the swimming pool, and a Léger mural of the hotel’s namesake, Hotel’s collection do not have formal plaques or labels there are no guidebooks, no pamphlets. Works by these celebrated hands hang next to some by unknown artists now barely remembered, all displayed in a haphazard, almost 19th-century fashion: The paintings in the Mirrors the warmth of the Mediterranean light. Credit Céline ClanetĪrt is everywhere in La Colombe: in the bedrooms, in the hallways and, most of all, in the dining room, casually adorned with a Picasso depiction of a flower vase, a Braque rendition of a lobster and a golden Miró that In the dining room, an untitled drawing of a woman’s face by Matisse. Inn - once the haunt of Picasso and Matisse, Chagall and Léger, Calder and Braque - has become one of the world’s most idiosyncratic museums, a bizarre monument to the permeable barrier between ![]() In a region already rich with art, this crumbling, secluded ![]() What matters at La Colombe, hidden in the hills between Nice and the Alpes Maritimes, is not the accommodationīut the walls, walls that display a staggering art collection donated in exchange for room and board by a generation of the 20th century’s greatest artists. No spa, no haute cuisine, and there are no newspapers on days when the local tabac decides to close. LA COLOMBE D’OR, the exclusive Provençale auberge with fewer than 30 rooms, is not exactly a “hotel” by local standards. From left: in La Colombe d’Or’s dining room, a painting Picasso gave Paul Roux, the founder of the hotel and the grandfather of its current owner inside one of the inn’s 25 rooms, a work by the little-known French painter Pierre Bompard.
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