7 place du Chapitre, Gard
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When the popes lived in Avignon, their cardinals had a familiar problem. The job was in the city, and the city was cramped. So they built their houses across the Rhône in Villeneuve, where there was room for a garden, and rode in on horseback when duty called. Provence had invented the commuter belt. Le Prieuré, built in 1332 as one of those cardinals’ houses and later given to canons as a priory, still runs on the idea.
Jean-André and Geneviève Charial of Baumanière bought the house after one look. Among hoteliers, that counts as an impulse buy. Geneviève did the interiors herself. She kept them light and spare and let the old stone do the talking. The priory leans against the collegiate church in old Villeneuve, below the fort of Saint-André. The atmosphere is hushed without being solemn. Alexandre Favier runs the house, and his staff are polished but never starchy.
The rooms are spread over three buildings from several centuries. The oldest are in the ivy-clad priory itself and tend to be small. The newer ones are roomier and have balconies, several of them above the pool. It could have been a muddle. Instead the antiques and the modern pieces get on well, as if the cardinals and the decorators had agreed to split the bill.
The cardinals' timetable still works. Days are for Avignon, five minutes away by car, with the popes' fortress and the bridge that stops halfway. Evenings are for Villeneuve, once the day-trippers have gone home. The crossing back is the reward. Behind the gate the tour buses vanish, and an eighteen-metre pool waits under centuries-old plane trees, with loungers spread across the lawn. The first swim after a hot day in town is the house ritual, and any cardinal would have traded his red hat for it.
Dinner is laid in the courtyard beneath trained wisteria. In April and May it hangs down in purple over the tables. Christophe Chiavola cooks Mediterranean food with plenty of herbs and flowers, and there is a priest's garden on the grounds to draw on. In spring, white asparagus arrives with shellfish and a hint of bergamot. Pigeon comes with haddock and seaweed, a pairing that reads like a dare. For a tasting, Châteauneuf-du-Pape is less than half an hour's drive to the north.
The kitchen aims high and does not always hit the mark, and on a busy night dinner can drag. In summer the mosquitoes dine outdoors too. Outside high summer the restaurant rests one or two days a week, so a midweek stay may mean one dinner across the river. In July the festival takes over Avignon, and calm becomes scarce on both banks, even behind the gate.
The cardinals knew what they were doing. They simply never had a pool. Seven centuries later, the commute takes five minutes and ends in one.
Before the hotel
Cardinal Arnaud de Via, nephew of Pope John XXII, gave his Villeneuve house to a group of canons to found a priory. Much later it became a boarding house for painters, and only then a hotel.
The pool lies at the foot of L'Atrium, the newest of the three buildings, put up in 1972; all fifteen of its rooms and suites look onto the water. It sits just off the paths of the priest's garden, and in summer a light lunch can be served beside the water. Most Deluxe rooms and Junior Suites have a balcony.
In the evening the restaurant's tables are laid in the courtyard beneath a wisteria trellis about a century old, between the stone pillars of the former cloister. Dinner is Christophe Chiavola's gastronomic menu; he has run the kitchen since May 2023. At lunch the kitchen switches to La Petite Table du Prieuré, a bistro menu cooked over embers and meant for sharing.
Beyond the cloister pillars lies a jardin de curé, a priest's garden in the old sense: beds of old roses, a vegetable plot and Mediterranean plants under plane trees and a lime that have stood for about a century. Bignonia shades the tables, and the pool is just off the garden paths. The light changes the garden through the day.
Junior Suites, around 40 m², add a sitting area to the bedroom and take up to three people, or two adults with a cot or two children under twelve. They are found in all three buildings and most have a balcony. This one opens instead through two arched French windows onto a small stone terrace screened by greenery.
At a glance
Where
7 Place du Chapitre, 30400 Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, Gard; in the medieval village on the right bank of the Rhône, facing Avignon and the Palais des Papes; near the Fort Saint-André, the Chartreuse and the Collégiale Notre-Dame. Châteauneuf-du-Pape and the Rhône wine route, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and the Luberon within reach by car
Why this one
Built in 1332 for Arnaud de Via.
Tables laid in the courtyard at night.
Days in the city, nights in Villeneuve.
The Edit Notes
The three buildings are not interchangeable. Le Prieuré, the main house, holds ten rooms, three Junior Suites and two Suites; Le Chapitre, attached to it, has five rooms and a Junior Suite and keeps the oldest character. L'Atrium was built in 1972: its fifteen rooms and suites are roomier, more current in style, and all look onto the pool. The Classic rooms, between 20 and 28 m², are only in the historic part. Stone and age, or space and the pool: decide which first.
The gastronomic restaurant serves dinner only, and its weekly closing days move through the year: Tuesday and Wednesday in April and October, Tuesday alone from 1 May to 15 June and in September, no closing day from 16 June to 31 August. The bistro lunch, La Petite Table du Prieuré, closes every Tuesday and Wednesday. Seats are limited, so a table is best booked with the room, and a midweek stay in spring or autumn should be planned around the closing days.
Christophe Chiavola's dishes are not altered: the restaurant asks guests not to request changes, offers no vegan menu and cannot turn its menus vegetarian, though it does take allergies and intolerances into account. At dinner the whole table is asked to choose the same menu; à la carte works for up to five, and from six people everyone takes the same menu. A group with a vegetarian, or with mixed appetites, should settle this with the restaurant before arriving.
The larger categories are built for families. A Junior Suite has a sitting area and takes up to three people, a baby's cot or up to two children under twelve; some Suites take five, with two bathrooms, and run from 50 to 75 m². Reception can put parents in touch with trusted babysitters. Three rooms are adapted for reduced mobility, two in Le Prieuré and one in Le Chapitre, and Relais & Châteaux lists the hotel as welcoming pets.
The price question
The money buys a fourteenth-century house in old Villeneuve with a garden and a pool behind its walls, across the river from Avignon, and a serious restaurant under its own wisteria. It does not buy consistent space: the oldest rooms are small, the roomier ones are in a 1972 building, and the restaurant's calendar and fixed menus need planning around.
Book it for two or three nights in spring or early summer, with a Deluxe room or Junior Suite on the pool side, dinner booked for the evenings the restaurant is open and the days given to Avignon. A stay that needs a vegetarian dinner, or that falls on a Tuesday and Wednesday in April or October, works better elsewhere.
La Maison d'Uzès
A seventeenth-century private mansion in the centre of Uzès, a Relais & Châteaux member with 13 rooms and suites around a monumental staircase, the restaurant La Table d'Uzès and a 150 m² Spa by Clarins under Romanesque vaults.
La Bonne Étape
A former post house on the Route Napoléon at Château-Arnoux, owned by the Gleize family since 1919, with Jany Gleize and his daughter Jane in the kitchen.
The Extra Edit
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