Les Tablettes, Cournon, Morbihan
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Arrival at La Grée des Landes comes with a small surprise. The car stays in the car park, just outside, and the luggage covers the last stretch in a little wooden cart, which guests push themselves along a stone path lined with plants. Nobody seems to mind. It is the first hint that this hotel has its own ideas about luxury, and that most of them involve slowing down.
The hotel sits on a rise above La Gacilly, a small Breton town with a very green family history. In 1959 a local boy, Yves Rocher, started making plant creams in the attic, and he never quite got round to leaving, even after the business went round the world. His son Jacques opened La Grée des Landes in 2009, the first hotel in France designed entirely on ecological lines. The buildings are low and wooden with grass on top, so from a distance the meadow seems simply to carry on over the guests' heads.
Rooms and suites, thirty-six in all, come in blond wood and soft natural colours, each with a private terrace facing the fields. The linen is organic and the tea tray holds local herbal teas. On the desk waits a pot of face cream, which in this particular town counts as a family tradition rather than a gift. Guests who prefer to sleep a little higher can book the treehouse.
Evenings begin in the bright lobby, which turns into a bar once the day's carts have been parked. Dinner at Les Jardins Sauvages is built on whatever the hotel's gardeners bring in. The chef, Anthony Le Fur, cooks organic and local, and a meal might start with a perfect farm egg and end with a dessert scattered with edible flowers. Afterwards comes a tisane of herbs picked that day, which is about as close to the garden as a drink can get without a watering can.
By day there are two pools, one indoors and one facing the fields, and a spa popular enough with outside visitors that treatments are best booked ahead. The hotel even runs slow-living workshops, although most guests seem to have mastered the subject unaided by the second day. A short stroll away, the botanical garden's fifteen hundred plants show exactly where the face cream started out.
This is a calm, green hideaway for couples and wellness weekends, and for anyone who reads the label on their shampoo. It lies inland, about an hour from Rennes and Vannes, so there is no sea view, and it is modern rather than historic. In summer, when the town's open-air photo festival hangs giant pictures in the streets, La Gacilly gets noticeably busier. Those hoping for a château, or for a porter to take their bags, will find neither.
At the end of a stay the cart rolls back down the path to the car park. Most guests seem to push it rather more slowly than they did on the way in.
In the village
From June to early November, La Gacilly's Festival of Photography turns the village's gardens, alleys and house walls into some thirty open-air exhibitions.
Every room is on one level and opens onto a private terrace, facing south-west across the hotel's ten hectares of moorland. Floors are oak, curtains linen, duvets and pillows organic cotton. The 28 rooms are the standard; the suites add a living area with a desk, and the Botanical Suites a large family bedroom. The ground-level layout works well for guests with reduced mobility.
Anthony Le Fur, who grew up in La Gacilly, runs a kitchen certified organic since 2013, the fish excepted. Produce comes from within 50 kilometres and from the kitchen garden beside the restaurant, whose paths are open for a walk before dinner. The menu is renewed every two months. In summer the meal can move out under parasols among the flowers.
The Yves Rocher spa's overflow pool lies behind a wall of glass facing the landscape, heated by the wood-fired boiler; its water is recycled to water the green roofs. A hammam and treatment rooms adjoin it. A separate Wellness space has a second indoor pool, used for aqua classes, beside a fitness area. Spa treatments are booked by e-mail only.
At the end of the garden, a wooden cabin sits six metres up in the branches of an old cypress, reached by a stair through the trees. It takes overnight guests from October to May, with a bed and a terrace among the foliage. From June to September it is used for spa treatments created for the place instead.
At a glance
Where
Les Tablettes, Cournon, 56200 La Gacilly, Morbihan; on the hilltop just outside the village, among moors, meadows and woods, with the river Aff below; Redon 15 km, Vannes 56 km, Rennes 64 km, Nantes 96 km; Redon station has direct TGV trains from Paris, Rennes and Nantes, about ten minutes by taxi
Why this one
Low wooden buildings under green roofs.
Certified organic since 2013.
Six metres up an old cypress.
The Edit Notes
The 28 rooms are the core of the hotel: ground level, a private terrace facing south-west over the grounds, oak floors and organic cotton bedding. The Prestige Suite adds a living area with a desk and a double terrace. The three Botanical Suites, in the southern part of the estate, each have a living room and a large family bedroom, and two can be combined for a bigger group. The four Suites des Landes, the newest, sit in separate dark wooden buildings.
The cabin, built in the upper branches of an old cypress six metres above the ground, can be booked for the night only between October and May. From June to September it becomes a treatment room for the spa's rituals. Anyone set on sleeping in it should therefore plan an autumn, winter or spring stay, and dress for it: those are the months when the evenings at the top of the steps are coolest.
Treatments at the Yves Rocher spa cannot be reserved through the room booking: the hotel takes spa bookings by e-mail only. The spa also sells day packages and gift boxes to visitors who are not staying, so the treatment rooms are shared with outside guests. A stay built around a particular ritual, such as one of the Signature rituals with warm entada seeds or argan oil, is best requested in the same e-mail as the dates, before arrival.
From June to early November, La Gacilly holds what the hotel describes as France's biggest outdoor photography festival, with around thirty exhibitions and more than 40,000 visitors. The village is at its liveliest then, while the hotel stays apart on its hill. Visitors who want the exhibitions should come in those months; those who want the moors, the lounge fire and the cabin to themselves will find the late autumn and winter months more suitable.
The price question
The money buys a modern, eco-designed hotel with an organic restaurant, a spa and walks across the moors, all in one place and without needing the car again after arrival. It does not buy the sea, a historic house or a village address: the buildings are low and contemporary, the coast is about an hour away, and La Gacilly lies at the foot of the hill.
Book it for two or three quiet nights in the cooler months, built around the spa, the restaurant and the paths of the estate, or in the festival months for the photographs in the village. A family that wants a beach day without driving, or a couple looking for a château, is better placed by the coast.
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The Extra Edit
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