Villa Marie – Saint-Tropez's hillside hideaway above Pampelonne

High above the Bay of Pampelonne, screened by umbrella pines on the hillside of Ramatuelle, Villa Marie offers Saint-Tropez without the clamour of the port below. Jocelyne and Jean-Louis Sibuet, the couple behind Les Fermes de Marie and La Bastide de Marie, rebuilt a three-star hotel called Les Bergerettes on three hectares of pine forest above the bay, and opened Villa Marie for its first season in 2004. The pine forest has since grown to four hectares, and the hotel now counts forty-five rooms and suites, most with a terrace or balcony framing the sea or the gardens. A heated, celadon-coloured lagoon pool is cut straight into the rock, a Pure Altitude spa hides in a shell-lined pavilion, and the Dolce Vita restaurant serves Mediterranean food under the pines. Villa Marie has been selected in the MICHELIN Guide, one of a handful of Riviera addresses chosen for restraint rather than spectacle.

01The house

Before it was Villa Marie, the plot on the chemin de Val-de-Rian held a modest three-star hotel. On three hectares of pine forest above the famous Bay of Pampelonne, the old three-star hotel Les Bergerettes was entirely reimagined, the seventh address taken on by Jocelyne and Jean-Louis Sibuet after they had already laid the groundwork for Les Fermes de Marie in Megève in 1989 and later built La Bastide de Marie, an enchanting hermitage in the heart of the Luberon vineyards, before being seduced by Villa Marie and the Riviera atmosphere of Saint-Tropez. Villa Marie opened for its first season that April, its small team of thirty-five moving back to Megève once the summer was over.

The result is a large, ochre-rendered building that borrows deliberately from Tuscany. Set within a preserved natural environment scented with aromatic herbs, citrus trees, palms and cacti, the property reinterprets the codes of Mediterranean living, its warm ochre façades hinting at the vibrant atmosphere inside, while the large building, with the distinguished air of an Italian villa, revisits the codes of a Mediterranean art of living from the fifties, its golden ochre façades announcing the colourful atmosphere that awaits. A renovation carried out in 2011 stayed true to the Sibuet spirit while bringing a touch of modernity.

02Rooms and suites

Villa Marie counts 45 rooms and suites, no two decorated alike. The Classic Room (26m²) looks onto the patio; the turret-set Colombier Room has its own balcony over the pine forest; the Villa Room (30m²) and Prestige Room (34m²) open onto patio or pinewood through a loggia or terrace. Junior Suites and Junior Family Suites (40m²) are built for romance or for families with a connecting children's room, while the Suites (50–60m²) face the sea directly, and the pink-and-fuchsia Pampelonne Prestige Room plays at couture glamour in the self-styled fashion capital of the Riviera.

Insider tip

Open May–October; private shuttle to the village; spa reserved for hotel guests.

The decoration throughout is Jocelyne Sibuet's own work: four-poster beds, personalised headboards, Cassis-stone basins, boudoir bathtubs, and baroque furniture from the fifties and sixties give each room its Riviera identity, and among the vintage suites she has decorated, one dressed entirely in Missoni fabric is not to be missed. The hotel's own FAQ lists further named suites — Canoubiers, Cap Camarat, Cap Taillat — each pushed further toward the sea view and the private terrace.

03Where to eat

Dinner is served under the glass roof of the Dolce Vita restaurant, where coral touches soften a hushed, candlelit room, or on the pine-shaded terrace with the bay as backdrop, every evening from May to October between 7.30pm and 10pm. The chef's menu runs from Maison Kaviari white tarama and a duck foie gras terrine with citrus chutney, through a Galères fish soup with caramelised fennel and rouille, Gambero Rosso carpaccio and Ossetra caviar, to braised whole fish from the Saint-Tropez market, sole meunière and a Fermes de Marie tradition of truffled coquillettes. It ends, inevitably, with the restaurant's own lemon soufflé, made to share.

Lunch is lighter and served from 12.30pm, salads and pasta of the day carried out to tables by the pool or in the gardens, while the kitchen's Provençal and southern-Italian leanings also surface in a pissaladière, a vegetable tian and a lobster linguine singled out on the hotel's own menu notes. Breakfast moves onto private terraces and the inner courtyard, with eggs cooked to order, avocado toast, smoked salmon and a sweeter table of pancakes and waffles.

04The bar

By day it is the Riviera Pool Bar — ‘Bellini & Bikini' is the house line — pouring refreshments to sunbeds before the evening's Tropezian ritual begins. By night the setting shifts to the shell-and-crustacean décor of the Bar Dolce Vita, open daily from 10am, where the signature list runs to Le Portalet (Cardhu whisky, maple syrup, grapefruit zest), a spiced-rum Pampelonne, The Citadel built on the family's own Domaine de Marie rosé, a pear-and-olive-oil Provençal, and a pastis-and-gin cocktail named, fittingly, The Place des Lices.

05Spa and wellbeing

The spa belongs to Pure Altitude, the plant-based skincare line founded by Jocelyne Sibuet, built around what she calls technicity — cosmeceutics for intensive cellular regeneration — and pleasure, for the women she had in mind when she created the range. Set apart in its own shell-walled pavilion scented with pine, rose and jasmine, it offers two treatment rooms given over to a hot shell massage, a cooling Ice Treatment or a Neroli-balm after-sun ritual, open daily from 9am to noon and 3pm to 8pm, with the pool and fitness area accessible around the clock.

The hotel frames all of this as a slow-living proposition rather than a spa visit alone: outdoor training with a sport coach in the pine forest, a sunrise yoga session, and electric bikes mapped for routes around Ramatuelle are built into the seasonal Pine & Pure Altitude Wellness Retreat package.

06The neighbourhood

Villa Marie sits a deliberate few minutes from the village it borrows its reputation from. A private shuttle runs throughout the day into the heart of Saint-Tropez, dropping guests at Place des Lices, the natural starting point for a stroll through the village, a terrace lunch or a chic escape by the sea. Pampelonne's beaches lie a few kilometres below, and Nice Côte d'Azur Airport is roughly ninety minutes away by car, Toulon-Hyères about an hour, which is precisely the distance that keeps the hotel's pine forest quiet while the coast below gets on with being Saint-Tropez.

07Making the most of a stay

The concierge team works to the Clefs d'Or standard and leans toward the theatrical: an outing on a private yacht to watch the sunset over the Mediterranean, a table reserved at the Riviera's most exclusive addresses, or a helicopter getaway to see the region from the sky. The hotel privatises for weddings and takes seminars of up to twenty guests in its Espace Riviera. Outside peak weeks, an Early Booking rate currently cuts 20 percent off stays of five nights or more between 12 May and 5 June, and again from 6 September to 4 October 2026, while two set packages — a wellness-and-fitness retreat and a wine-and-sailing itinerary built around the family's Domaine de Marie — bundle spa time, dinners and a day at sea into the rate.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.