La Maison d'Uzès

In the grand townhouses of old France, the staircase did the boasting. Nobody needed to mention money. A family simply built a wide stone stair and let its visitors climb it. La Maison d'Uzès still has its staircase from the seventeenth century, and much of a stay is spent going up and down it. That is more fun than it sounds, because at the bottom lie vaults far older than the house, and at the top lie the roofs of Uzès.

The house is about three centuries old, and its first owners would probably approve of what has been done to it. The old stone has been left alone, and everything around it is light and modern, without the stiffness townhouses tend to keep long after their owners have gone. With only thirteen bedrooms, it feels distinctly grown-up. Even so, a discreet passage leads from the stair to the upper floors, the kind of thing children adore and adults pretend not to notice.

On the floors above, the bedrooms are bright and roomy, with the odd antique keeping the modern furniture company. Some windows look over old tiles to the cathedral and the Tour Fenestrelle, a round, arcaded bell tower that recalls the one in Pisa, minus the lean. The rule is simple. The higher the room, the better the view, and the climb grows accordingly.

The best move of the day, though, is downwards. Before dinner the stair leads to the spa, beneath Romanesque vaults that were already centuries old when the staircase arrived. Down there waits a Roman bath, its water lit in slowly changing colours. On paper this could be a nightclub. In practice it is very quiet indeed, and the best place in Uzès to get hungry without lifting a finger.

Dinner has moved out to La Table d’Uzès, a few steps away on the Place de l’Évêché, which only adds a short stroll between bath and bed. Christophe Ducros cooks mostly from vegetables and refers to his growers by their first names, as if they were cousins. The chickpeas are Olivier's. The strawberries are Adrien's. In warm weather the meal moves onto a terrace under a pergola, facing the cathedral. On Saturdays the market fills the Place aux Herbes nearby, under its arcades and plane trees, and a fair share of it ends up on those plates sooner or later. That alone is reason enough to stay over a Saturday.

The staircase has one drawback, which is that it is a staircase. Much of the house is reached only by stone steps winding upwards, and although a porter takes the bags, anyone who dislikes stairs should ask for a room the lift reaches. Cars stay outside the old centre, and a call from the cathedral car park brings a valet for the bags and the car. The restaurant takes the start of the week off, and in midsummer Uzès fills to the brim, so the stair is rarely climbed alone.

In the old days, a staircase showed visitors how high a family stood. At La Maison d'Uzès it shows something more useful, namely the way down to the bath and the way back up to bed.