Villa Gallici, Aix-en-Provence

Every July, Aix-en-Provence becomes one of the opera capitals of the world. The festival born here just after the war fills the courtyard of the old archbishop's palace with Mozart under the stars, and the whole town seems to hum along. Villa Gallici, a short climb up the hill, is the festival's natural backstage, and in a sense its longest-running production.

It looks like an eighteenth-century Italian villa that time forgot, and the building is genuinely old, a classic bastide named after the Galicy family who once lived there. But much of the magic is more recent. In the early nineties, three Aix decorators fell for the place and dressed it like a stage: damask and velvet, gilding and four-poster beds, a different wallpaper in every room. A decade later an Italian hotelier bought it, the story goes, simply because his wife liked it. Villa Gallici looks more authentic than it is, and it does not much mind.

That is exactly why it works. Like opera, it is beautiful artifice, and knowing how the effect is achieved takes nothing away from it. Each of the twenty-three rooms is a separate scene, some opening onto the garden, some onto the old roofs of Aix, and two little villas have private terraces and hot tubs. The garden plays its part too: cypresses, jasmine, roses and fountains, and a group of bronze travellers by Bruno Catalano, their middles missing, as if they had left part of themselves in Aix.

The table keeps the Italian thread. Dinner at La Taula begins with water scented with star anise, lavender and lemon, and focaccia to dip in olive oil from Les Baux, then turns to fish brought in by a local fisherman and ends, improbably and successfully, with chocolate and olives. In summer it is served beneath the planes on the terrace.

In July, the house has its own choreography. An early dinner on the terrace, a ten-minute stroll down to the Archevêché, an opera under the night sky, and then the walk back up the hill to a garden that looks very much like the set just left behind. Outside festival season, the stage belongs to the guests, with the markets, the Cours Mirabeau and Cézanne's studio all within walking distance, which few of the grand hotels around Aix can claim. The company is cultivated and international: opera lovers, festival patrons, romantic couples.

Every production has its weak scenes. Service, warm on a good day, can turn rule-bound, and rooms are now and then overlooked. The restaurant is noisy on busy nights and its prices are high, breakfast and parking cost extra, and in festival weeks rooms go early and rates climb. The walk home from town is, inevitably, uphill.

At the Archevêché, the sets come down when the festival ends. At Villa Gallici, the set stays up all year, and the audience gets to sleep in it.