Lily of the Valley

A Philippe Starck-designed hotel on the Cap Lardier headland where the entire property, not just a wing of it, is organised around a 2,000 square metre facility called the Shape Club. Twenty minutes from Saint-Tropez by road but functionally a world apart, the 44-room hilltop hotel takes its architectural cues from Californian villas and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with every detail from the light switches down specified by Starck himself.

The Shape Club is genuinely the point of a stay here rather than an amenity attached to a beach holiday: two steam rooms, a sauna, a snow room with an ice fountain, and a 25-metre heated pool sit alongside a roster of coaches and trainers who build both in-stay workouts and longer-term plans, with the property's stated focus running toward weight management, detox and fitness reset rather than passive relaxation. Four restaurants serve health-forward menus built on local, organic ingredients, feeding directly into the property's structured nutrition programmes.

One recent account of a stay noted the grounds show some wear against the otherwise carefully kept design — worth knowing for guests expecting the polish to be absolute throughout. The hotel suits travellers booking a genuine multi-day reset rather than a Riviera stay with a good gym attached; helicopter transfer from Nice, at roughly twenty minutes, is a commonly used route for guests treating the property as a self-contained destination.