Paris is disappearing. The inner city has ceded to the suburbs, Haussmann has given way to Le Corbusier. But my mind is going in the other direction, cantering into an era of feathered hats and foppish kings. Why? Because this is my Louis XVI moment.
It’s a stretch, I know. Sitting in this unapologetically orange commuter train, it would be fair to say I have nothing in common with a doomed king of France. Well, almost nothing – for I am fleeing Paris. Where Louis ran from his subjects, I’m escaping a different sort of tyranny: autumn.
When I arrived in the city yesterday, the sun was setting. It wasn’t so much the crowning of the day as an abdication. The light crept down the walls to languish on the banks of the Seine, among the empty wine bottles and spent Metro tickets. I felt like I was living in an elegy by a second-rate Beat poet. And hell, no-one wants that. So I’ve decamped to the Loire, the so-called Valley of Kings, to seek fortune at Les Sources de Cheverny.
It’s a royal welcome. When arriving you pass the hotel’s grandest building, the 18th-century Château de Breuil, a turreted beauty of cream stone overlooking springy lawns that get progressively wilder as they approach the edge of the forest. Long ears of grass dance defiantly in the breeze, as if in rustic revolt against more formal French gardens. Then there’s the fragrant and shady bois, 110 private acres of it, the sort of dense woodland that was once used to hunt wild boar and deer on horseback.
To my surprise, we turn in the other direction. There’s a stroke of design genius here. Instead of making the château the centrepiece (and everything else feel like a distant satellite), the grounds form the heart of the hotel. The reception, restaurants and many of the rooms are arranged in a loose semicircle around a central lake, strung together by paths running between thick tufts of meadow. Autumn’s reign of terror has not made it here: even in October, the greens are flecked with petals of white, gold, red, purple…
My room is in one of the new wings, a timber building that backs onto a field of playful horses. There’s an air of Nordic simplicity lent by the sage walls, blonde-wood cabinetry and mid-century furniture upholstered in a deep mossy green. Minimal and organic, the room has a soothing, almost spa-like quality to it. There’s a good reason for that…
Les Sources de Cheverny is the younger sibling of spa superstar (and vinotherapy visionary) Les Sources de Caudalie, which is ensconced in the vineyards of the Château Smith Haut Lafitte estate, further south on the border of Bordeaux. Founders and hoteliers Alice and Jérôme Tourbier got into the hospitality game early, which means they’d racked up 20 years of experience by the time they opened their second one in Cheverny. Like Les Sources de Caudalie, it’s underpinned by the holy trinity: spa, food, vine.
It just so happens that Alice’s sister is Mathilde Thomas, founder of fêted French cosmetic brand Caudalie. When the Tourbiers and Thomas team up on one of their Caudalie-toting Vinothérapie spas, they go all-in on the healthful power of the grape. You can have thermal grape baths, crushed cabernet body scrubs, merlot wraps – even the hot tub keeps to the theme, made in the style of a barrel, using oak hooped with steel.
It’s no fad. The secret lies in the polyphenols, so I’m told. It turns out that grape seeds contain perhaps the most powerful antioxidant in the world, something first noticed in vineyard workers, whose hands were soft and blemish-free thanks to the sap of the vines. After my treatment, I emerge feeling, well, a bit like a grape: plumped and juicy. Perhaps I’d always look and feel like this if I spent less time drinking the stuff…
But no, that’s not the spirit here. At Les Sources de Cheverny, the self-punishing sort of wellness is out and joie de vivre is in. As if to prove it, the hotel has its own wines in the making. The day I arrive turns out to be one for the history books: the first ever harvest of the Cheverny estate vines, planted before opening and now mature enough to produce quaffable grapes. It’s a big deal; in the Valley of Kings, your fruits are the jewels in your crown.
While the first vintage must wait, the food will not. I’m booked in to Le Favori, the hotel’s destination restaurant, with a sleekly minimal dining room and placid lake views. Chef Frédéric Calmels was poached from La Réserve in Paris and wasted no time netting a Michelin star.
He places before me things I’ve never even thought of eating, much less tasted. Among the procession are spiny cucumbers marinated in garum from Tours, a moss and lichen broth, honey made specifically from bees that collect sunflower pollen, and something that resists all attempts at classification: the ‘acidulous condiment’. It is sensationally good, every dish of it, and paired to perfection with wines from across the Loire’s 280-kilometre spread.
The next morning, in a low haze that evaporates under the ascending sun, I cycle off in search of the palatial Château de Cheverny. I find a treasure trove. There are paintings by Titian and Raphael; walls hung with 17th-century Gobelin tapestries; and tortoiseshell and bronze chests by master cabinet-maker Nicolas Sageot, who at the height of his career sold furniture for more than 600 livres a piece, enough to net you six thoroughbred horses. There’s even a set of antlers belonging to a prehistoric forebear of the moose, mounted above a staircase of tuffeau stone.
For all this finery, no French king ever graced the house with his presence, not even Louis. He didn’t get far, poor Louis, arrested in Varennes-en-Argonne in the east of France. My escape to Cheverny has fared far better. I might not be a king, but I got all the riches.
Go on your own treasure hunt at Les Sources de Cheverny.
