Hôtel des Lices – a family address off Place des Lices since 1972

Hôtel des Lices sits in a quiet side street off Place des Lices, the plane-shaded square at the centre of Saint-Tropez where pétanque and produce markets have shaped village life since the early 1800s. Opened in 1972 by Odette Scagliola, the four-star hotel has stayed within her family for three generations, who still run it with the attentiveness of a private house rather than a commercial one. Forty rooms, three villas and two studio apartments wrap around a garden swimming pool a few streets back from the old port, and the restaurant and bar both carry Odette's name, a continuing tribute to the woman who founded the house. The MICHELIN Guide selects Hôtel des Lices among its Saint-Tropez addresses, a recognition that suits a stay built on continuity rather than spectacle, in a town more often associated with yachts and noise than with family hospitality passed down since the early 1970s.

01The house

Odette Scagliola founded the hotel in 1972, and three generations of her family have run it since, following what the house still describes as the spirit of a grand family establishment rather than a commercial one. The address sits in the heart of the village, close to the harbour and to Place des Lices itself, keeping the hum of the port a short walk away while putting the market, the boutiques and the cafés of the centre a few minutes on foot. Hotel directories list the building as constructed in 1972 and last renovated in 2004, evidence of a house that has kept pace with the resort without rebuilding its character from scratch.

02Rooms and suites

Forty rooms fill the main house, decorated in what the hotel calls a refined and elegant style, modern furniture set against warm Provençal colour. Categories run from the 16 square-metre Parking Side Economy room to the 28 square-metre Garden Side Junior Suite on the ground floor, and the 38 square-metre Family Room, which sleeps four behind a street-facing façade. Several rooms, among them the Garden-Pool Side Deluxe and the Pool Side Standard, open onto balconies above the heated garden pool. Prices run from €180 for the smallest room to €325 for a junior suite or family room, as published by the hotel in October 2026.

Insider tip

Book ahead for high season; garden pool heated depending on season; breakfast 7–11am; private parking on site.

For longer or larger stays, the hotel lets three villas and two studio apartments around the village. Villa La Paloma, 110 square metres with three bedrooms for seven guests, adjoins the hotel itself with its own private garden; Villa Les Salins, 105 square metres for six, sits inside a private park four kilometres from the centre with its own pétanque ground; and Villa Antoine, 150 square metres for eight across three bedrooms and a connected apartment, has its own pool a few minutes' walk from the village. Guests in all three keep free access to the hotel's pool, bar and restaurant, along with daily housekeeping and a concierge. Studio 10 and Studio 11, 25 and 35 square metres, sit 250 metres from Place des Lices in a private residence with its own pool and garden.

03Where to eat

The restaurant takes its name, and its guiding spirit, from Odette Scagliola herself, opening as Restaurant Odette in 2022, fifty years after she welcomed her first guests. Chef Romain Ferrere runs the kitchen, cooking Mediterranean dishes built on local produce beside the pool, in a garden the house keeps deliberately sheltered from the town outside. The restaurant seats around ninety guests, sixty of them outdoors, and opens annually from late March to the end of October. Breakfast is served in the room or poolside, from seven until eleven each morning, a slow start that suits a town that rarely wakes early.

04The bar

In the evening, the Lounge Bar gathers guests around the pool for home-made cocktails, with a short tapas menu and what the hotel describes simply as a delicate musical backdrop. It is built for an unhurried evening with friends or a partner rather than for Saint-Tropez's louder reputation, a few streets from the bars that line the port.

05The neighbourhood

Place des Lices takes its name from the medieval term for a jousting ground, and the square as it now stands dates to the early 1800s, when twelve plane trees were planted to shade what has become the social heart of the village. A produce market fills it every Tuesday and Saturday morning, and the painter Charles Camoin set his easel here in 1936 to capture its café life on canvas. Pétanque is played under the same trees most days, a local institution the square itself helped establish. A short walk away stands La Tarte Tropézienne, the bakery that gave the town's cream cake its name and that appears in the 1956 film that made Brigitte Bardot and Saint-Tropez famous together. The Citadelle de Saint-Tropez, a fortress with a maritime museum and roof terrace, and the Musée de l'Annonciade, a former chapel hung with paintings by the artists who worked here, both lie within easy walking distance. Pampelonne Beach is about twelve minutes away by car.

06Making the most of a stay

A private car park removes one of Saint-Tropez's perennial headaches, useful in a village where a parking space near Place des Lices all but disappears in high season. The hotel also keeps a jacuzzi and offers massages on request, a quiet complement to the pool rather than a full spa. Timing matters here more than most places: the Bravades, a religious and military procession the town has kept for more than 440 years, fills the streets each 16, 17 and 18 May, the Voiles de Saint-Tropez brings several hundred yachts into the bay each autumn, and Place des Lices turns into an ice rink and Christmas market in December. A simple version of a stay starts with coffee by the pool, continues with the morning market a few streets away, and ends with dinner at Odette as the garden cools after dark.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.