La Mirande, Avignon

Most of Provence's finest hotels sit in the countryside: a farmhouse among the vines, a pool, a view and a long lunch. La Mirande is the opposite. It is a town house with no pool at all, pressed against the walls of the Palais des Papes in the heart of Avignon, and it is the address for travellers who come to Provence for its culture as much as its scenery. The luxury here is not space or water. It is the house itself, and the city at its door.

What the house offers is the chance to live, for a night or two, inside an eighteenth-century French home. The family who bought this old cardinal's residence restored it with a decorator who had worked at Versailles, and all twenty-six rooms are furnished as if their first owners had only just stepped out: Chinese wallpaper painted for export, silk and toile de Jouy, antiques, paintings hung at the height they would have chosen. Even the televisions hide inside mirrors. The rooms vary a great deal, and the ones to request look straight onto the Palais.

The table is the other reason to come. The gourmet restaurant, under the Renaissance ceiling of the cardinal's old dining room, is led by Michele Donvito, a young Italian whose cooking is precise, pared back and fascinated by texture. Down in the medieval part of the house, in the old Pamard family kitchen, a dozen guests sit on certain evenings around a long table while dinner is cooked on a nineteenth-century wood-fired range, and by day the same room becomes a cooking school for adults and children. Tea comes under the glass roof of the courtyard, and chamber musicians occasionally play in the salon.

Avignon itself supplies everything else. The papal palace is next door, the ramparts and the famous broken bridge are within a short walk, and in July the theatre festival turns every square into a stage. The fast train from Paris arrives in under three hours, which makes a car optional, and the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the villages of the Luberon, Les Baux and the Pont du Gard all lie within an hour for anyone who hires one.

That makes La Mirande the ideal start or finish to a journey through Provence, or a complete stay for those who would rather walk to dinner than drive to it. The guests are couples, culture lovers and food lovers, and the money is cultivated rather than loud. Avignon has more modern hotels, but none so personal.

There are compromises. Without a pool, July afternoons can feel long, and there is no spa or gym either. Several rooms are compact, dim and a little worn, breakfast and tea are charged separately, and during the festival the city is crowded and prices climb. Arriving by car through the bollards around the Palais is best done with directions from the hotel.

Countryside hotels in Provence are built for doing nothing. La Mirande is built for doing a great deal, slowly: a palace in the morning, a cooking lesson in the afternoon, dinner in a medieval kitchen. Nobody misses the pool for long.