La Bastide de Moustiers

Where do great chefs go when they stop cooking? For Alain Ducasse, a name usually linked with chandeliers and silver domes in Monaco and Paris, the answer turned up on a motorcycle trip through Provence. It was an old stone bastide just beneath Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, which he kept as his private refuge before opening it to guests. A stay here means borrowing a chef's day off, and that explains most of what makes the house tick, from the slow rhythm of the days to what ends up on the plate.

The setting would revive anyone. Moustiers, home to a few hundred people, is wedged between limestone cliffs, with a gilded star hanging on a chain high above its rooftops, and the bastide sits below it in four hectares of lavender and olive trees. Local craftsmen restored it piece by piece. Its thirteen bedrooms are each dressed around their own Provençal theme, and the suite to ask for is the Bastidon, across the lane, with a walled garden and a fountain of its own.

In truth the bastide is the back garden of a kitchen, with bedrooms attached, and on this particular day off the garden is the boss. It rules like a benevolent dictator. The vegetable plots run to nearly 2,000 square metres, and beside them some eighty herbs and edible flowers grow in a garden of simples. Between them they decide what the kitchen cooks, and chef and guests alike submit quite willingly. A wander among the rows before dinner is a way of reading the menu before it has been written.

The cooking is what a chef would want to eat on a day off, and nothing like the ceremony of the great city dining rooms. Valentin Fuchs, who trained in Ducasse's kitchen in Monaco, took over in spring 2025, and his food is rustic and Mediterranean, taken from the garden and from farms in the valley, so the menu changes as the harvests do. On warm evenings the terrace becomes the dining room, and the service is relaxed and friendly, closer to a family meal than a formal restaurant.

Breakfast comes outdoors as well, at tables spread out for privacy, on plates painted in the potteries that made the village famous. After that, the days divide between doing and not doing. The Gorges du Verdon lie twenty minutes away, with the lake of Sainte-Croix for swimming and kayaking. In early summer the lavender of the Valensole plateau turns violet. Most guests, though, drift between the vegetable garden and the small, serene pool, with nothing more strenuous than a novel.

The day off has a few rough edges. The lane to the house is narrow and steep, and several rooms are snug. Upkeep around the pool can slip at the height of summer, when visitors pour into the village. Couples who want Provence slowed right down will find it ideal, for three nights or more, and so will anyone curious to eat the way a chef does on holiday. June brings the lavender, while autumn gives the village back to its residents.

Ducasse rarely takes a day off these days. For a few nights, at least, his guests can take his.