La Ferme Saint-Siméon

The best seat at the Ferme Saint-Siméon is a garden chair. From the lawn above the estuary, the view stretches over the mouth of the Seine to Le Havre, where cranes line the docks and ships slide in and out of France's busiest container port. It is not the kind of view a brochure usually leads with. It is, however, one of the most important views in the history of art.

In 1872 Claude Monet painted that harbour at dawn, an orange sun over grey water and a few smudged masts, and called it Impression, Sunrise. A critic mocked the title, and the name stuck to an entire movement. Monet knew this hillside well. He was one of the young painters who gathered at the farm, where the innkeeper, Madame Toutain, fed them like spoilt sons. The masts have since grown into cranes. The sunrise has not changed at all.

The house itself is older than any of this, a seventeenth-century farm on the western edge of Honfleur that the Toutain family opened as an inn in 1825. It still looks the part, with half-timbering and slate roofs gathered around a garden above the water. The thirty-five rooms are spread between the main house and the old cider press, and the style is country house rather than design hotel. Twenty have their own private hammam, a generous touch in Normandy, a region that already supplies its visitors with plenty of moisture.

Dinner comes in two speeds. Les Impressionnistes is the gastronomic dining room, where the chef Matthieu Pouleur cooks Normandy produce with a modern touch, while La Boucane is the easy-going bistro, with a taste for the sea. Afterwards the garden comes back into its own. Across the water, the far shore turns into a long string of lights, and the cranes that looked so industrial at teatime start to look, in the dark, rather like a painting.

By day, the garden offers painting lessons with the same view the masters had and, as a rule, rather less talent. The old harbour of Honfleur is within walking distance along the coast road, its tall slate houses leaning over the water as if posing for one more portrait. On summer weekends the town fills with day-trippers, which makes the walk back up to the quiet of the farm all the more pleasant. The Spa Potager, with its pool, looks after anyone who would rather admire the light from a lounger.

This is a classic house, and comfortable with it. It makes an easy weekend escape from Paris, a little over two hours away by car, for couples and art lovers who like a traditional country hotel with old-school service and a story behind every beam. Anyone looking for contemporary design, or a bargain, will find neither, and the rates reflect the legend as much as the rooms.

Monet needed a single sunrise to change the history of painting. Most guests settle for watching one from the garden, coffee in hand, while a container ship the length of three football pitches glides into the harbour he painted. From this lawn, that is achievement enough.