Le Mas Candille – Mougins' hillside icon reborn

On the pine-covered hillside above Mougins' old village, Le Mas Candille has been a fixture of the Cannes hinterland for generations, the kind of address that regulars mention quietly rather than loudly. The hotel shut its gates between 2020 and 2024, until entrepreneur Jean-Philippe Cartier and the Courtin-Clarins family bought and completely reimagined the estate, calling in Franco-Mexican designer Hugo Toro to redraw every room from scratch. What emerged is a 46-room resort spread across three houses — Le Mas, La Bastide and La Villa — set in a park of cypress and olive, with two swimming pools, a spa built with Clarins, and two restaurants constructed anew. The MICHELIN Guide lists Le Mas Candille among its Selected addresses, a quiet confirmation of a status this hillside has carried for decades: close enough to Cannes for the Croisette to matter, far enough above it for none of the noise to follow.

01The house

Le Mas Candille started as an eighteenth-century olive grove on the slopes below Mougins' old village, long before it became the boutique hotel international travellers now recognise.

The house closed its doors between 2020 and 2024, re-emerging only after entrepreneur Jean-Philippe Cartier, founder of the H8 Collection, and Prisca Courtin, chair of the Clarins supervisory board, bought and relaunched the estate together.

For the rebuild they turned to Hugo Toro, the young Franco-Mexican designer who worked from an almost blank page to give the house the soul of a true Provençal mas while lending it the light-footed ease of a grand Californian villa. It was not his first assignment of this calibre: Toro has already shaped the Gigi restaurants in Paris, Val d'Isère and Saint-Tropez, New York's Villa Albertine and London's Midland Dining Room.

02Rooms and suites

The 46 rooms and suites step down the hillside across three buildings. Le Mas, the original eighteenth-century farmhouse, holds the reception, the bar and 19 rooms looking over either the garden or the plain of Grasse. Next door, the long silhouette of La Bastide contains 21 rooms arranged over several levels, each with its own terrace, set between the hotel's two swimming pools. Below them, tucked into two discreet pavilions, La Villa shelters six 70-square-metre suites with private terraces and views that stretch across the Grasse valley toward sunset.

Insider tip

Open spring to early winter; Cannes 7km, Nice airport roughly 30 minutes by car.

Toro's rooms are lit and warmed by a world designed entirely to measure, with painted textiles, tinted-oak furniture and objects he sourced piece by piece; only the wrought-iron terrace chairs survive from the old Mas Candille.

03Where to eat

Dinner happens at Le Candela, the hotel's Mediterranean dining room with Italian inflections, open nightly from seven to ten. The kitchen is run by chef Alexandre Boucobza, trained at Le Grand Véfour in Paris, at La Réserve Paris alongside Jérôme Banctel, and at La Villa Archange under Bruno Oger, before bringing a precise, generous approach to seasonal, Provençal-Italian cooking.

By day, Le Pool takes over: lunch is served at green-marble tables around the main swimming pool, on a menu built for sharing — a proper salade niçoise, sea bream ceviche, grilled octopus salad, pearl prawns and barely seared Mediterranean red tuna. Every Sunday evening the terrace turns into Grill by the Pool, candlelit tables set around the water for grilled fish and meat in a deliberately relaxed, summery mood.

04The bar

Hugo Toro also designed the Bar du Mas, where deep banquettes and generous armchairs sit against shelves of amber-lit bottles, the ochre of the façade echoed in the colour of the sky at dusk. The terrace stretches out under century-old pines facing the hills of Grasse, and the lounge opens nightly from half past six, no booking required, for signature cocktails and small plates to share.

05Spa and wellbeing

The hotel's wellness quarters sit apart from the main house, down an avenue of palms. Wellness is central to the whole project: The Glow House is the first spa to carry Clarins' new Glow concept, in which treatment, sport, relaxation and nutrition are treated as a single, continuous experience, built inside a 450-square-metre house designed by Hugo Toro.

Inside are three treatment cabins with private terraces, a double cabin for couples, a hammam, a sauna, a cold plunge, a Technogym-equipped gym and a 25-metre pool that runs from indoors to out, heated through the year and reserved for adults. Clarins' LED-mask technology and tailored two- to four-day Glow Trip programmes — Reset, Shape, Beauty — extend the experience well beyond a single massage.

06The neighbourhood

Mougins itself climbs the hill above the hotel in a tight spiral of lanes that once drew Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger and Christian Dior, and where Pablo Picasso spent his last years, dying there on 8 April 1973. The village still holds galleries in every shaded alley, a dedicated Centre de la photographie, and FAMM, the museum devoted to women artists housed in the former Musée d'Art Classique.

Grasse and its perfume museum lie some fifteen kilometres north; the Croisette, the Suquet hill and the Lérins islands are ten kilometres the other way, with Antibes half an hour off and Nice's Promenade des Anglais roughly three-quarters of an hour by car.

07Making the most of a stay

Le Mas Candille keeps Riviera hours, open from the first days of spring to the edge of winter, with the spa running throughout the year. Nice airport is roughly thirty kilometres away, about half an hour by car, and the Cannes railway station, with direct TGV links to Paris, is under thirty minutes from the gate.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.