Inside Villa La Coste, Europe's most exciting new hotel
Summary
It may now be commonplace for hotels to boast of their art; it’s rather rarer for a stellar collection to open a place to stay. Château La Coste, an estate a few miles north of Aix-en-Provence and an astonishing repository of contemporary sculpture and architecture in the South of France, this summer formally opens a hotel surrounded by 600 acres of woodland, organic vineyards, olive groves and lavender fields. Indeed, it features works by many of the same Asian artists: the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example. One of his seascapes hung above my bed here, and he will be the subject of the first exhibition in the estate’s new photography gallery, designed by Renzo Piano. His House of Air, at the top of a slope planted with grenache vines, seems at first to have been there forever.