Now, a number of people choose Airbnb<\/strong>, but there are still differences. What can’t I find at Airbnb <\/strong>? 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 \u00c9cole Nationale Sup\u00e9rieure 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<\/strong> concept.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n <\/strong><\/p>\nTout l’int\u00e9r\u00eat de la chose \u00e9tait justement que je ne vienne pas de l’h\u00f4tellerie. En revanche, j\u2019ai fait appel \u00e0 une personne issue de l\u2019h\u00f4tellerie de Luxe. Sa culture et son expertise client ont permis de traduire le projet en actions.\u00a0 J\u2019avais le concept en t\u00eate et des valeurs \u00e0 partager. Elle m\u2019a aid\u00e9 \u00e0 les exprimer et les faire vivre sur le terrain en termes de prestations, de recrutement et de gestion.\n <\/strong><\/p>\nLe Hameau des Baux propose une interpr\u00e9tation diff\u00e9rente de l’h\u00f4tellerie dont le principal int\u00e9r\u00eat est celui d’\u00eatre en France, avec un regard sur l’\u00e9cosyst\u00e8me fran\u00e7ais, alli\u00e9 \u00e0 celui du luxe. L’enjeu \u00e9tait de r\u00e9ussir \u00e0 d\u00e9velopper une prestation de service de luxe avec les contraintes de la masse salariale, enjeu tr\u00e8s important en France. Pour moi, dans l’h\u00f4tel, \u00e7a se traduit par\u00a0: la libert\u00e9 du client. Cela tend aussi \u00e0 le responsabiliser, \u00e0 en faire un v\u00e9ritable acteur de son s\u00e9jour. Cela signifie qu\u2019il va trouver, au Hameau et dans d’autres h\u00f4tels que je souhaite d\u00e9velopper, une sorte de \u00ab\u00a0self-service\u00a0\u00bb et une certaine autonomie.\n <\/strong><\/p>\nDepuis l\u2019ouverture du Hameau des Baux<\/strong>, les clients en font l’exp\u00e9rience chaque jour. Le lieu s’y pr\u00eate \u00e0 merveille car il invite \u00e0 la d\u00e9ambulation, d\u2019un endroit \u00e0 l\u2019autre et d\u2019un service \u00e0 l\u2019autre. Le rythme de client est respect\u00e9, rien n\u2019est impos\u00e9. Par exemple, il est libre de prendre son petit-d\u00e9jeuner jusqu’\u00e0 midi et demie. Cette grande plage horaire permet d\u2019avoir moins de contraintes pour le repas du midi. \u00a0Nous proposons donc des d\u00e9jeuners \u00e0 emporter sous forme de pique-niques. Ce qui change du d\u00e9jeuner classique, assis \u00e0 table. C\u2019est aussi l\u2019esprit du food truck install\u00e9 sur la place du village et ouvert le soir. On y vient, de l\u2019h\u00f4tel ou d\u2019ailleurs, pour passer une soir\u00e9e sous les \u00e9toiles.\n <\/strong><\/p>\nNous ne voulons pas associer Luxe et guind\u00e9. Au Hameau des Baux<\/strong>, le Luxe se vit dans la simplicit\u00e9 et l\u2019authenticit\u00e9. Quand nous \u00a0accueillons des comit\u00e9s ex\u00e9cutifs, ceux-ci sont l\u00e0 pour se ressourcer, dans un esprit d\u00e9tendu. Dans le m\u00eame esprit, nous avons choisi des uniformes qui respectent les codes du luxe mais qui sont tout de m\u00eame beaucoup plus d\u00e9contract\u00e9s que ce que l’on peut voir ailleurs. Sobri\u00e9t\u00e9 des couleurs, style tendance et confort pour les \u00e9quipes avec par exemple le short tr\u00e8s appr\u00e9ci\u00e9 quand les temp\u00e9ratures d\u00e9passent les 35\u00b0. \u00a0Je trouve compl\u00e8tement anachronique aujourd’hui d’accueillir un client en tailleur noir et chemisier blanc\u00a0!\n <\/strong><\/p>\nLe boutique-h\u00f4tel existe d\u00e9j\u00e0 depuis vingt ou trente ans. Pour souligner l\u2019innovation dans un lieu comme le n\u00f4tre, je l\u2019ai d\u00e9fini comme un concept-h\u00f4tel, en parall\u00e8le au concept-store. Cela veut dire que notre offre ne se limite pas \u00e0 l’h\u00e9bergement et la restauration. C’est une offre de prise en charge globale avec une approche simple, authentique et humaniste.\n <\/strong><\/p> <\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n\n <\/strong><\/p>\nPar cette libert\u00e9 accord\u00e9e aux clients, ajout\u00e9e \u00e0 la simplicit\u00e9. Prenons l\u2019exemple de l\u2019\u00e9quipe. Notre crit\u00e8re n\u2019\u00e9tait pas les ann\u00e9es d\u2019exp\u00e9rience dans le secteur de l\u2019h\u00f4tellerie de Luxe, mais avant tout l\u2019envie de partager, le plaisir \u00e9prouv\u00e9 \u00e0 faire plaisir au client. Les parcours de l\u2019\u00e9quipe sont donc tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rents, mais tous partagent la m\u00eame envie et les m\u00eames valeurs du service. Chacun se sent ambassadeur du Hameau des Baux. Nous avons eu une approche diff\u00e9rente et nous les avons accueilli par ces mots\u00a0: \u00ab\u00a0ici, vous \u00eates tous ma\u00eetre d’h\u00f4tel\u00a0\u00bb. Si un client demande au jardinier de situer Arles par rapport \u00e0 l’h\u00f4tel, souhaite savoir si Saint-R\u00e9my est une ville sympathique, il doit, sinon r\u00e9pondre, au moins le prendre en charge.\n <\/strong><\/p>\nC’est vrai pour tout le monde. Nous avons donc form\u00e9 tout notre personnel pour conna\u00eetre la r\u00e9gion, pour ceux qui n’y avaient jamais v\u00e9cu, et nous les avons responsabilis\u00e9 sur le fait que le client s’attend \u00e0 un service global de la part de chacun, qu\u2019il soit r\u00e9ceptionniste, gouvernante ou femme de chambre. Je suis tr\u00e8s heureux des retours. Les clients nous manifestent chaque jour leur satisfact\n <\/strong><\/p> <\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I’m also an antique dealer specializing in the second half of the twentieth century(E&E Esprit XXe<\/strong>). 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. Before, people wanted the hotel<\/strong> to feel like home<\/strong>. Now it’s the other way around: we want what’s in the hotel.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Exactly. There’s the entry point of the Hameau des Baux<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n \n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \n 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 Proven\u00e7al: 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You can find Provence on the “comptoir”, which offers a condensed selection of carefully selected products from the region. I wanted to have Proven\u00e7al 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<\/strong>. So we’re involved in territorial marketing and at the same time we’re offering the Nuxe<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n And then I teamed up with Jean Christophe Legr\u00e8ves<\/strong>, the creator of Thirdman<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> is on sale in France exclusively in Paris, at Colette<\/strong> and Hameau des Baux<\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[205,203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architect-hotel-amo","category-the-art-of-entertaining-and-the-customer-experience"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Hameau](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Les-Baux-de-Provence_MyriamPastor-590x250.jpg\")
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?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"Event\"\/](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Evenement-5_SebastienCabanes-583x250.jpg\")
\nHow do you plan to revisit the codes of luxury hotels?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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”? <\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nfrom 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.<\/p>\n![\"hotel-concept\"](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/LesChambres_Moulin-2_AnthonySubra-590x250.jpg\")
The boutique is a veritable hotel entity? Can we come here just to buy?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"hotel\"](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/LeComptoir_AnneVanDerStegen-512x341.jpg\")
Will you be producing your own furniture?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"Hotel](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Chaise-longue-LeCorbusier-1974-AnneVanDerStegen-512x365.jpg\")
Revisiting the hotel business<\/h1>\n
![\"Cabriolet\"](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/LesCabriolets_AnthonySubra-512x341.jpg\" "\\"tradition")
How did you renovate these homes? To what extent have you brought modernity to a traditional environment? <\/strong><\/h2>\n
I read that you have an app for Le Hameau. What does digital technology mean to you in the hotel business?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"Dining](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/LaSalleDuPetitDejeuner_AnneVanDerStegen-512x341.jpg\")
What is your vision of the art of entertaining? French style?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"Foodtruck\"](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/LeCamionBleu_AnneVanDerStegen-512x341.jpg\")
And the Provencal touch in the art of entertaining?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"Sebastien](\"https:\/\/delporte-hospitality.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Evenement-1_SebastienCabanes-512x342.jpg\")