Le Hameau des Baux, an authentic concept

In 2015, I met Eric-Jean Floureusse, founder of the Hameau des Baux concept hotel, who introduced me to the creation of his hotel. This establishment is a veritable hamlet that has been bought out in its entirety to form a single property. Located in Provence, the hamlet has all the hallmarks of Provencal architecture. Eric-Jean Floureusse has renovated the hamlet of Les Baux to create a concept hotel.

There are also many people who say that their establishment: “is not a hotel, it’s a concept, it’s not a boutique-hotel, it’s something different”.

Now, a number of people choose Airbnb, but there are still differences. What can’t I find at Airbnb ? There’s authenticity because the accommodation is immersed in the city, but it lacks the social aspect inherent in a hotel. And I think that the hotel is a crossroads, which implies that it’s open to locality, to proximity. A customer recently told me that “the Hameau des Baux was nothing like the other hotels”. Of course, from a geographical point of view, we are geographically isolated, which is important to us in order to guarantee our customers’ privacy, but we do our best to build bridges with the local area. This dynamic gives life to the area itself and to the hotel. We have built relationships with local cultural players. I chose Arles because it’s the nearest major city and because the Hameau des Baux is located in three different areas: Provence, the Alpilles and the Pays d’Arles. Today, we are in contact with the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, and more recently, I hope, with Actes Sud. I’m interested in these cultural players because art is part of the Hameau des Baux concept.

What’s interesting about your background is that you weren’t originally trained as a hotelier. What’s your vision of the hotel business? How have you brought a different perspective to this field?

Tout l’intérêt de la chose était justement que je ne vienne pas de l’hôtellerie. En revanche, j’ai fait appel à une personne issue de l’hôtellerie de Luxe. Sa culture et son expertise client ont permis de traduire le projet en actions.  J’avais le concept en tête et des valeurs à partager. Elle m’a aidé à les exprimer et les faire vivre sur le terrain en termes de prestations, de recrutement et de gestion.

Le Hameau des Baux propose une interprétation différente de l’hôtellerie dont le principal intérêt est celui d’être en France, avec un regard sur l’écosystème français, allié à celui du luxe. L’enjeu était de réussir à développer une prestation de service de luxe avec les contraintes de la masse salariale, enjeu très important en France. Pour moi, dans l’hôtel, ça se traduit par : la liberté du client. Cela tend aussi à le responsabiliser, à en faire un véritable acteur de son séjour. Cela signifie qu’il va trouver, au Hameau et dans d’autres hôtels que je souhaite développer, une sorte de « self-service » et une certaine autonomie.

Depuis l’ouverture du Hameau des Baux, les clients en font l’expérience chaque jour. Le lieu s’y prête à merveille car il invite à la déambulation, d’un endroit à l’autre et d’un service à l’autre. Le rythme de client est respecté, rien n’est imposé. Par exemple, il est libre de prendre son petit-déjeuner jusqu’à midi et demie. Cette grande plage horaire permet d’avoir moins de contraintes pour le repas du midi.  Nous proposons donc des déjeuners à emporter sous forme de pique-niques. Ce qui change du déjeuner classique, assis à table. C’est aussi l’esprit du food truck installé sur la place du village et ouvert le soir. On y vient, de l’hôtel ou d’ailleurs, pour passer une soirée sous les étoiles.

Nous ne voulons pas associer Luxe et guindé. Au Hameau des Baux, le Luxe se vit dans la simplicité et l’authenticité. Quand nous  accueillons des comités exécutifs, ceux-ci sont là pour se ressourcer, dans un esprit détendu. Dans le même esprit, nous avons choisi des uniformes qui respectent les codes du luxe mais qui sont tout de même beaucoup plus décontractés que ce que l’on peut voir ailleurs. Sobriété des couleurs, style tendance et confort pour les équipes avec par exemple le short très apprécié quand les températures dépassent les 35°.  Je trouve complètement anachronique aujourd’hui d’accueillir un client en tailleur noir et chemisier blanc !

Le boutique-hôtel existe déjà depuis vingt ou trente ans. Pour souligner l’innovation dans un lieu comme le nôtre, je l’ai défini comme un concept-hôtel, en parallèle au concept-store. Cela veut dire que notre offre ne se limite pas à l’hébergement et la restauration. C’est une offre de prise en charge globale avec une approche simple, authentique et humaniste.

How do you plan to revisit the codes of luxury hotels?

Par cette liberté accordée aux clients, ajoutée à la simplicité. Prenons l’exemple de l’équipe. Notre critère n’était pas les années d’expérience dans le secteur de l’hôtellerie de Luxe, mais avant tout l’envie de partager, le plaisir éprouvé à faire plaisir au client. Les parcours de l’équipe sont donc très différents, mais tous partagent la même envie et les mêmes valeurs du service. Chacun se sent ambassadeur du Hameau des Baux. Nous avons eu une approche différente et nous les avons accueilli par ces mots : « ici, vous êtes tous maître d’hôtel ». Si un client demande au jardinier de situer Arles par rapport à l’hôtel, souhaite savoir si Saint-Rémy est une ville sympathique, il doit, sinon répondre, au moins le prendre en charge.

C’est vrai pour tout le monde. Nous avons donc formé tout notre personnel pour connaître la région, pour ceux qui n’y avaient jamais vécu, et nous les avons responsabilisé sur le fait que le client s’attend à un service global de la part de chacun, qu’il soit réceptionniste, gouvernante ou femme de chambre. Je suis très heureux des retours. Les clients nous manifestent chaque jour leur satisfact

How did the idea for this hotel come about? How did you come to say to yourself, “I’m going to invest in a hotel”?

The hotel is the crystallization of all the activities in which I had an interest: interior design, cooking, how to please, sharing and conviviality. Sharing is what interests me most, and it’s also the goal we set for our customer reception: to share the experience. This is very important. The hotel then appeared as a place where it was possible to have many points of entry.

I’m also an antique dealer specializing in the second half of the twentieth century(E&E Esprit XXe). We immediately made the connection with the hotel. We thought it could become a kind of “showroom”, furnishing all our rooms with furniture for sale. Customers can buy the chair for the room they’ve booked after seeing it in action and using it themselves. It renews the hotel and makes it fresh. It is important to maintain consistency, but a room will not be exactly the same from one room to the next.
from one year to the next. And it’s a boutique hotel in the sense that all the furniture is for sale. And it works wonderfully well.

Before, people wanted the hotel to feel like home. Now it’s the other way around: we want what’s in the hotel.

For me, the vision of the hotel is this: just like home… But not like at home. I don’t go to a hotel to be at home, otherwise there’s no emotional interest. On the other hand, I need to be able to walk around very casually if I feel like it. With regard to the freedom we were talking about, it’s very important for me to offer customers a setting in which they feel like walking around in their bathrobe or Louboutins. The challenge is to guarantee all its possibilities. The “milieu” has become completely stereotyped, and we have to be careful not to confine luxury customers to one type or another. We’re witnessing a phenomenon of mixing genres. I embrace this spirit. Now we’re multiple: multiple ourselves during the day, multiple because we’re bosses during the day, with family, with friends, and so on. And theluxury hotel is a concentrate of all this: being able to live through all these points of entry: organizing an executive committee in a luxurious way and at the same time having a cousinade in a luxurious way too.

The boutique is a veritable hotel entity? Can we come here just to buy?

Exactly. There’s the entry point of the Hameau des Baux customer, who has fallen in love with a painting exhibited in the gallery, who wants to take home a piece of furniture they’ve seen live, or who wants to treat themselves by packing a perfume or candle from our counter. But there’s also the lover of rare furniture. And that’s sharing too: I find it interesting to bring someone from the outside into the hotel. Furniture makes for great encounters. A piece of E&E Esprit xxe furniture – top-of-the-range furniture from the 50s to the 80s – is part of our shared heritage.

Will you be producing your own furniture?

No, not at the moment. But I’d like to open up even more to contemporary creation by allowing designers to express their talent at the Hameau des Baux. I’m currently working on prototypes with young designers. Soon there will be lighting fixtures and furniture created for the Hameau des Baux, for sale and to live in at the hotel.

The result is a kind of complementarity that contributes to the real life of the Hameau des Baux and its modernity: there’s the myth of Provence, eternity, calm; all the vintage furniture that, for me, contributes to what I call the “collective memory” that recalls something of our culture. It’s what brings warmth and emotion. And then there’s the shock of contemporary creation, whether through works of art or, in the near future, through the furniture we’re going to be producing. For the moment, we’ve only introduced lighting fixtures because I didn’t want to freeze the pieces: anything utilitarian, used by the customer, we bought, trying to skew the idea a little. The bedside tables, for example, are not design, because I didn’t want the Hameau des Baux to become a museum. But it’s true that the pieces are scripted. An important notion for me was that of being urban: we’re located in the South, in the countryside, but in the end we still have a very urban clientele. It was interesting to appeal to that.

Revisiting the hotel business

How did you renovate these homes? To what extent have you brought modernity to a traditional environment?

To date, fourteen rooms have been renovated; last year there were six. Fourteen have been renovated and decorated, and six are still in their Provencal tradition. Next year there will be twenty. In three years, all our rooms will have been renovated, and we’ve also changed the taps. The infrastructure has remained Provençal: the bathrooms are quite well designed, often with terracotta tiles on the floor, and the shower is also separate, with terracotta tiles. We have decided not to change this. The extension project, meanwhile, will be radically more contemporary, with a desire to take up material codes. A major extension project is in the pipeline.

The approach is really urbanistic: there’s a village and the idea is to stretch that village out with an extension, as is the case with old towns and new towns. In any case, our aim is not to plagiarize, but to create something contemporary while remaining an extension of what already exists. There’s also a desire to run the hotel in winter, because it’s very difficult to run it in winter at the moment, because it’s designed to be outside. And of course to develop a spa section.

I read that you have an app for Le Hameau. What does digital technology mean to you in the hotel business?

I’m completely paradoxical because I missed the digital wave and I’m aware that we can’t do without it! It was a real commitment. There’s another paradox: claiming our Provencal roots – the eternity of Provence, Marcel Pagnol’s village, Alphonse Daudet’s mill – and at the same time installing fiber optics to guarantee free, high-performance Wi-Fi access. It’s indispensable in everyday life, for the whole family, but also in the professional arena, during seminar events for example.

We’ve also developed an application whose usefulness is absolutely magical. You can plan your trip in advance, get organized, find out about upcoming events, locate furniture, order massages or book one of our vintage convertibles for a trip to the Alpilles!

What is your vision of the art of entertaining? French style?

It’s like home, but not like home. In other words, customers need to feel warmly welcomed and perfectly at ease. It’s in this sense that I’m at my most authentic, both in my service and, above all, on the customer’s side. And at the same time, it has to produce the “Wow !!!!” effect. Surprise, move, touch. The secret is to speak to people’s hearts, whether through a decoration, a service, a gesture or a dish. Then there are a certain number of references to have, because people need reference points: breakfast is casual, it’s a buffet breakfast, but the cutlery is silverware, which we recovered from former hotel services. So we picked up a series of plates from the Hotel de Paris in Monaco that I found interesting.

But I was careful to create different moments, different universes, always with the idea of creating surprise and not locking into a model. Our breakfast world is very different from our evening catering. For the evening service, we chose to play on a double-code, a double reference: one that recalls the village square with the market, the truck that opened to sell products, and another that refers to food-trucks, with their ultra-modern urban origins. There was this ancestral code and the alliance of the current food-truck trend.

And the Provencal touch in the art of entertaining?

You can find Provence on the “comptoir”, which offers a condensed selection of carefully selected products from the region. I wanted to have Provençal references, but I didn’t want to get bogged down in them. At the moment we don’t have our own oil, so we work with a mill. The mill has also developed a range of cosmetics (shower gel, soap) called Une olive en Provence. So we’re involved in territorial marketing and at the same time we’re offering the Nuxe brand because we needed to recall a certain number of luxury codes and references. Both brands are present in the rooms. We have an offer that is rarely seen in the hotel industry today: care.

And then I teamed up with Jean Christophe Legrèves, the creator of Thirdman, a fragrance somewhere between perfume and eau de toilette. It’s a concentrate that’s totally unheard of in perfumery. Jean-Christophe speaks of “waters of the third kind”. These are very fresh waters, with a slightly stronger hold than eau de Cologne. Thirdman is on sale in France exclusively in Paris, at Colette and Hameau des Baux.

As far as VIP receptions are concerned, we have a chef’s preparation and we’ve included fresh champagne pop. In the rooms, there’s a free minibar with water only. It’s also a question of the size of the hotel, but managing a mini bar is relatively complicated and I always find it a bit mean-spirited to ask guests to pay for a drink when they’ve put a certain amount of money in their room. So we decided to offer free water, still and sparkling. In the suites, there’s also an organic orangeade, as we integrated this dimension into our design as part of a sustainable development project. This applies not only to the kitchen, but above all to all logistics, water treatment, etc.