Domaine de la Klauss

Most hotels hand their guests a number. The Domaine de la Klauss hands them a relative. All twenty-eight rooms and suites are named after members of the Keff family, and the grandest is Simone, at the top of the tower, with a round bathtub at the foot of the bed and the hills of Lorraine on three sides. Nobody here asks for room twelve. The question at reception is whether Simone is available.

The names are there because the family still is. The Keffs have fed travellers in Montenach since 1869, and their old farm inn, the Auberge de la Klauss, stands eighty metres from the hotel. Alexandre Keff started working there at four years old, carrying plates in a little Lorraine smock for twenty cents a time. He grew up to be an airline pilot, and when the banks turned down his plans for a hotel, he paid for it out of his salary. He still flies for Luxair. The Klauss may well be the only hotel in France paid for at cruising altitude.

It opened in 2016 on a hill in the far north-eastern corner of Lorraine, where France runs out of room between Luxembourg and Germany, with Metz and Luxembourg City both within an hour's drive. Alexandre had it built in the yellow stone of the village, so that it looks as if it had always been there, and the vaulted dining room could pass for medieval. In fact it is younger than plenty of the cars parked outside. The age here is in the family, not the walls.

Breakfast shows how close the farm still is. The family raises ducks and black pigs on its land around the village, and their charcuterie turns up on the buffet beside warm pretzels. In a hotel where the rooms are named after relatives, buying the ham from strangers would have seemed rude.

Dinner is a choice between generations. In the hotel, Le K serves a long and polished tasting menu by the chef Benoit Potdevin. Across the lane, Alexandre's brother Frédéric cooks the Lorraine classics the auberge has always served, foie gras very much included, in a big and cheerful rustic dining room. The sensible plan is two nights. Either way, the wine comes up from a cellar that runs for three hundred metres under the estate, cut from golden Jaumont stone, where some of the Armagnacs are nearly as old as the auberge.

On warm days, life moves outdoors to a long pool with a bar built into the water. It faces a nature reserve, six hills that ring the village and fill with wild orchids in May and June. Few swim-up bars can claim a view that is protected by law. In the stables nearby, one of the Spanish horses answers to Tempranillo, which, in a house with a cellar like this, was probably inevitable.

Colder days belong to the spa, beneath stone vaults of its own. The rooms are nearly always full, weekends above all. Couples love it, and so do gourmets who like warmth more than ceremony; anyone after centuries of ghosts has come to the wrong hill. Twelve new suites are planned over the next few years. The family tree, presumably, will have to keep up.