Les Bains Gardians
PUBLIC · Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Camargue · 2024 · 4 hectares, 67 rooms · Hotel and restaurant
Four hectares in the middle of the Camargue regional park, a few minutes from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. On the site, two neighbouring hotels built by two families in the 1960s, and some fifty gardians' cabins, the shelters that cowherds and shepherds have built since the 18th century to watch over the animals, roofed in asymmetrical thatch cut against the prevailing winds. Jean-Pierre Marois's second property after Les Bains Paris, and his first collaboration with the studio. Sixty-seven rooms, forty-eight of them cabins.
The project began with an excavation rather than a clean slate. Visits to the property served to find what could be brought back into use, 1960s postcards to recover the atmosphere of the place, and the motifs that recurred everywhere to fix a vocabulary: the trident, the sun, the bull's head. The envelope stays spare, at a distance from maximalism and from Camargue folklore.
So the motifs return, but displaced. The curtains take up the mouches pattern at a very large scale, woven with a Nîmes label. The bed covers carry the check of the gardians' own. Above the basins, the tiles show the bull's heads and suns of the region. The furniture mixes the rustic with the pop of the 1960s to the 1980s, found piece by piece, because mixing periods remains the surest way to make a place welcoming. Beside a kidney-shaped pool, Le Pont des Bannes, a local institution since the 1960s, has reopened as a restaurant.
Photography Mathieu Salvaing
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