Château Richeux – Les Maisons de Bricourt

Most grand hotels greet the evening with champagne. Château Richeux prefers a grog. In the lounge of this villa on the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, guests settle in with a hot rum and lemon, or an infusion of the house spices, and listen to the wind whistling in off the water. It is a sailor's drink, and in a house run by a family of cooks and spice merchants on a coast of corsairs, it could hardly be anything else.

The family is the Roellingers, from Cancale, a few kilometres up the shore. Over the decades they have built a small world around this bay, from the workshop in town where their spices are roasted and ground to the restaurant upstairs. Château Richeux, a 1920s villa with a castle's ambitions, all battlements and bay windows, is the grandest piece of it, yet it still has the air of a family house. The word grog, incidentally, comes from a British admiral, Edward Vernon, nicknamed Old Grog, who watered down his sailors' rum. Nobody here has felt the need to follow his example.

There are only a dozen rooms and suites, large and airy, with antiques set against a calm, modern backdrop. The ones to ask for have big bay windows facing the Mont, which strictly speaking stands in Normandy. Bretons blame the river: "Le Couesnon, dans sa folie, a mis le Mont en Normandie." From these windows they have at least kept the view.

Dinner is upstairs at Le Coquillage, where Hugo Roellinger cooks the bay and the garden together. Cancale oysters share the menu with vegetables from the estate, and almost everything carries a trace of the family's spices, a pepper from one ocean or a vanilla from another. The sailors of Saint-Malo once brought such things home from the Indies at considerable risk. Here they arrive with a good deal less drama, and the meal ends, naturally, with a grog.

By day, the coastal path runs along the shore to the harbour of Cancale, where oysters are sold by the dozen beside the boats and eaten standing up, with a view of the beds they came from. Nearby, at the family's Ferme du Vent, the Celtic baths offer a sauna and a pool facing the waves, which is the other local way of warming up.

This is a quiet, slightly remote house, at its best for gourmets and couples who like weather as much as sunshine, and it closes for part of the winter. Saint-Malo is around twenty minutes by car, and the Mont itself under an hour, best visited early and admired again afterwards from a safe distance. Anyone looking for nightlife will find that the gulls make most of the noise around here.

Every year, millions of visitors crowd across the bridge to Mont-Saint-Michel. At Château Richeux it simply sits in the window, while the wind picks up outside and someone in the lounge asks for another grog. Admiral Vernon would have disapproved. The guests, as a rule, do not.