Hôtel Bastide Fontvieille, Aix-en-Provence

We came down the Cours Mirabeau in dappled shade, past the fountains and the café terraces, and turned in at a hôtel particulier whose carved door gave little hint of what lay behind. Hôtel Bastide Fontvieille keeps its best card hidden: a walled garden of clipped box, fig trees and an 18th-century fountain still trickling into a mossy basin. The light fell green and gold through the leaves, and somewhere a cicada had started early. Inside, the bones of the mansion remained, with a sweeping stone staircase, original tomettes underfoot, and ironwork balustrades. The patronne welcomed us with a glass of cold rosé and the unhurried courtesy that Aix seems to manufacture by the cartload.

The room

Our room looked over the garden rather than the Cours, which traded a little spectacle for a great deal of calm. The proportions were eighteenth-century and generous: tall windows, a marble fireplace, original hexagonal terracotta tiles, and walls in a soft Provençal ochre. The furnishings were antique but unfussy, a walnut armoire, a wrought-iron bed, linen the colour of unbleached flax, with a single contemporary painting to keep the past honest. The bathroom, in pale stone, had a roll-top tub and locally pressed olive-oil soaps. We threw the windows open each morning to fig-scented air and the sound of the fountain, and felt no urgency to be anywhere at all.

Bastide Fontvieille keeps its garden like a secret, and the secret is the whole point of staying.The Suite Edit

Service & food

Service is gracious and personal in the way of a well-run family house; our requests were met with a smile and a follow-through, from a market itinerary to a dinner table in the Mazarin. The kitchen is modest but generous: breakfast is served in the garden when weather allows, all fresh croissants, apricot confiture, melon and a board of regional cheeses, and at dusk an honesty bar of Provençal rosé, pastis and a few good gins comes into its own beneath the figs. There is no dinner service, which on a balmy Aixois evening we minded not at all, the town's tables being a short stroll away.

The verdict

This is a hotel for slow travellers, garden-lovers and couples who come to Aix for its light, its markets and its café-philosopher pace rather than its nightlife: settle in, and let the days unspool. The honest caveat: it is a historic building with a lift that reaches only some floors and a handful of stairs between levels, so guests with mobility needs should ask carefully about room placement before booking. We left on a market morning, arms full of lavender and olive oil, already mourning the garden.