Montreval
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Montreval
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Lake Verane, the Verane Valley
The first house. A farmhouse, a boathouse and a long wall of glass facing the water.
38 rooms and suites — From €780 a night
Montreval Verane began as a dairy farm that had stopped being a dairy farm. Camille Ferrand bought the buildings in 1998 with no clear intention beyond stopping them falling down, and spent three years finding out what they wanted to be. The answer turned out to be a hotel with thirty-eight rooms, a working kitchen garden and an unreasonable number of fireplaces.
The original farmhouse holds the drawing rooms, the library and eleven of the rooms. A low modern wing added in 2006 runs south along the shore and holds the rest, each opening onto the water through a full wall of glass that can be slid entirely away between May and September. The boathouse at the end of the terrace is where breakfast is served in summer and where the rowing boats live all year.
Everything you can touch here came from within sixty kilometres, with three exceptions we are happy to name: the glass, the taps and the mattresses. Floors are local larch, oiled rather than lacquered, so they mark and then recover. Walls are lime plaster over stone. Beds are wool over horsehair, made up in linen woven at the mill at Sevrey and replaced, honestly, more often than we would like.
Breakfast runs from seven until eleven and nobody will hurry you. The lake is swimmable from late May, sharply, and from July with pleasure. Cimaise serves dinner from seven; Le Batelier serves lunch on the water whenever the weather permits, which our staff assess each morning and post on the board by the library door.
Arrival
The house
Montreval VeraneRoute du Lac 4Verane 1893Reservations for every house are taken centrally on +44 20 7946 0139.
Who runs it
Léa Bertrand
Director, Montreval Verane
What is here
Suites & villas
Room — 32 m²
The room the house was designed around. Oiled larch, lime plaster, a wool bed and a window that opens fully onto the water.
From €780 a night, for 2
Suite — 68 m²
Two rooms and a private stretch of terrace at the southern end of the wing, where the light lasts longest.
From €1,480 a night, for 3
The table
The bath
A thermal bath cut into the hillside, and a cold pool fed straight from the lake.
Six treatment rooms, a thermal bath at thirty-six degrees, and an outdoor cold pool that in February is a genuinely serious proposition.
Sérène VeraneExperiences
A guest letter
“On the second morning somebody moved my chair four metres along the terrace, into the sun, before I came down. Nobody mentioned it. It was there the next day too.”
Helena Marsk, Ostrelle
Five nights in a Lake Suite, February
Elsewhere
Above Manda Cove, the Calanera Coast
Four terraces cut into the cliff, and a staircase of two hundred and eleven steps down to the sea.
41 rooms and suites — From €690 a night
Aubris village, the Aubris Downs
A vineyard house with twenty-two rooms, a working cellar and a very good baker.
22 rooms and suites — From €640 a night
Below the escarpment, the Sabaia Sands
Twenty-nine tented suites, one fire, and no light after ten except the sky.
29 tented suites — From €1,150 a night
Reservations
Our own team answers, not an agency. Rates fall on the fourth night and again on the seventh, which tells you what we would prefer.
