L'Auberge Basque, Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle

Every home makeover programme follows the same plot. A young couple buys an old farmhouse and builds something daringly modern beside it, while the neighbours shake their heads until the cameras come back and the result wins them over. Cédric and Marion Béchade wrote their own episode in the hills inland from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, nearly twenty years ago. L'Auberge Basque is a traditional inn on one side and a modernist cube on the other, and a stay shuttles happily between them.

The old half is the inn itself, built more than three hundred years ago, with the white walls and painted woodwork of the Labourd. It holds the restaurant and the lounges, where breakfast, generous and resolutely local, starts the day. Behind the old façade, though, the interiors are surprisingly contemporary, with wide windows onto the garden, and black-and-white photographs of village life line the staircases and passages, a reminder of what the place was built on.

The new half is for sleeping. Its rooms and suites, twelve of them, were dressed by Marion Béchade in weathered wood and clean lines, and their big windows look across the garden and the pool to the hills of the Labourd, with La Rhune rising behind them. At dusk the Pyrenees turn into a row of shadow puppets. Families can take the apartment, which sleeps five.

In these hills the day can go either way. Downhill, the ocean at Saint-Jean-de-Luz is fifteen minutes west. Uphill, a little train climbs La Rhune, past villages where strings of red peppers dry against white walls. Closer still, the lake of Saint-Pée has a small beach for a quieter swim. Towards evening, guests drift back to the heated pool or take a slow turn around the park before dinner.

The makeover continues in the kitchen. Béchade, who trained with Alain Ducasse, takes Basque produce apart and puts it back together in new shapes at dinner. At lunch the dining room relaxes into a modern Basque café, with a menu written in chapters, the last of them devoted to what it calls the pleasures nobody should go without. Veal tartare comes scented with hay, the croque turns Basque, and the floating island is scattered with hazelnuts from Saint-Pée.

No makeover is ever entirely finished. A few rooms are tight for space, and a wet spell leaves the outdoor pool idle. The wifi has moods of its own, and some of the more daring dishes may puzzle traditionalists. Gourmets will find a natural base for exploring the Basque Country, families will find good cooking without a stiff dining room, and a long weekend gives coast and mountains each their turn.

On the makeover shows, the presenter always returns a year later to see whether the new building has settled in. Here, almost two decades on, the inn and the cube have long since become old friends.