Maison Aribert

In some homes, the visit begins with a small ritual at the door. The shoes come off, and with them goes some of the stiffness of being a guest. Nobody walks in socks through a showroom, so the gesture says that the house expects to be lived in. At Maison Aribert, in the old spa town of Uriage above Grenoble, the same ritual opens a stay shaped by the chef Christophe Aribert and the mountains he grew up in.

Aribert grew up in the mountains of Isère, in a family of farmers and innkeepers, and after two decades in the kitchen of a grand hotel down the road he opened a place of his own. His restaurant is a bright room of glass and timber beside a nineteenth-century chalet in the wooded park of Uriage, facing the trees, with a vegetable garden run on permaculture principles on its roof. His guests sleep in the chalet and in a second house a few steps away, which works like a family home, with a kitchen and a lounge to share downstairs.

Upstairs, the bedrooms are few and calm. Rounded shapes and the colours of bark and leaves keep the eye at rest, while handmade Hästens beds make an early night hard to resist. Showers look out at the trees. No television hangs on the wall, and the silence is deliberate. A few more rooms in the old chalet have terraces above the park.

Barefoot is how the house is meant to be explored. Downstairs, a quiet basement holds hot and cold basins with windows onto the greenery, and massages and yoga can be booked. Outside, the mountains close in on every side. Belledonne rises behind the village and the Vercors faces it across the valley, and in winter the ski slopes of Chamrousse are close by. Guests can even arrive by train, via Grenoble.

The shoes go back on for dinner, though the dining room hardly asks for ceremony. Aribert cooks the region rather than the world, drawing on his own garden and on the Alpine lakes. A perch from Lake Geneva may arrive with char eggs and a touch of Chartreuse, and the meal can close with a tart of Grenoble walnuts. Breakfast the next day is generous enough to argue for a second night.

The house asks a little of its guests. Rooms are so scarce that dates fill fast, and the restaurant does not open every day, so a stay needs planning around it. Swimmers will find no pool and only a modest spa, and Uriage is quiet after dark. Maison Aribert is for gourmets who care where their dinner grows, and for any couple overdue a reset. One night is enough for a dinner, two leave time for the mountains. Autumn brings mushrooms, and summer is the garden's season.

In most homes, taking the shoes off is a courtesy. At Maison Aribert it is the first sign of a stay that slows down from the feet up.