A fourteenth-century cardinal's palace at the foot of the Palais des Papes, bought by one family in 1987 and restored by them since. Twenty-six rooms, a cooking school in the old kitchen, and an owner still in the building.
The house
La Mirande stands at the foot of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, in what was a cardinal's palace in the fourteenth century, behind a seventeenth-century façade, furnished largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century taste. There are twenty-six rooms, each decorated individually. It is a five-star hotel that has resisted looking like one, which in a city of this traffic is a decision that has to be made repeatedly rather than once.
The family
The Stein family took the building in 1987. Martin Stein left a career in medicine to restore it, and the family has directed it since. That is the reason it is in this issue: it is genuinely owner-held, in a category where "independent" is now more often a tone of voice than a shareholding. The difference shows in the things nobody would spend money on for a return, which is usually where you can tell.
The kitchen
There is a gastronomic restaurant under Florent Pietravalle, chef here since 2016, plus Le Bistrot Pamard, the tavern-style Mirage, and La Table Haute, a guest table set in the original nineteenth-century kitchen. The cooking school has run out of that kitchen since 1994, with resident and visiting chefs. Of everything on offer here, the kitchen table and the school are the parts you cannot get elsewhere, and the parts we would send a guest for.
At a glance
The TGC view
La Mirande is the answer when a guest wants Provence without a resort, and a house with its owners still in it. We book the rooms, the kitchen table and a place at the school, which sells out first and is the reason most of our guests go back.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗The newest building in this issue by more than a century, standing on the shore of the Alster inside the city. It is also the house that publishes least about itself, and we have written it accordingly.
Read the review →Behind a gate on Kantstrasse that most people walk past, two buildings that used to try women and then hold them. Grüntuch Ernst finished the conversion in 2022. The rooms were cells, and the house neither hides that nor sells it.
Read the review →A walled garden at the foot of Hidari Daimonji, half an hour north of Kyoto Station, with twenty six rooms in it and sixteen UNESCO sites within reach. The point of the house is that it is not among them.
Read the review →