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BlackBook Rural Reinvention What’s Old is Nouveau Again The latest Loire Valley opening, Les Sources de Cheverny, pairs modish elegance with the most idyllic of settings. By Alexander Lobrano Twenty-one years after they invented a charming new style of rustic-chic wine-country tourism in France with Les Sources de Caudalie hotel near Bordeaux, French hoteliers Alice and Jérôme Tourbier have done it again. Seeing off the frequently formal and often stuffy spend-a-night-in-a-faux-château idiom that’s prevailed at hotels in the Loire Valley for years, the Tourbiers’ new 49-room Les Sources de Cheverny hotel near Blois offers a fresh contemporary take on one of the most enchanting destinations in France. There is, in fact, a château on the 45ha estate where Les Sources de Cheverny is located – the handsome 18th-century limestone Château de Breuil – but it’s more of an elegant accessory than a centrepiece for this 36 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
From left: tarte tatin at L’Auberge restaurant; inside a contemporarychic suite Opposite: the handsome, centuries-old Château de Breuil “We wanted to offer a hotel experience that feels like being invited to a friend’s Loire Valley country estate for the weekend” PHOTOS MARIE PIERRE MOREL complex of six newly built wooden lodges and meticulously restored stone-and-masonry farm outbuildings that house the hotel’s bar, restaurant, spa and most of its rooms. “We wanted to offer an experience of this region’s bucolic beauty and a warm and relaxed style of hospitality with a hotel experience that feels like being invited to a friend’s Loire Valley country estate for the weekend,” explains Jérôme Tourbier. “So instead of channelling the aristocratic trappings of the Loire’s famous châteaux, we were inspired by the idea of going to a house party where you can bicycle, get spa treatments, do wine-tastings or go for a long walk in the forest.” To encourage these sylvan strolls, there’s a rack of French-made Aigle rubber boots available in a variety of sizes for hotel guests at the reception. Working with wooden siding, a break from the vanilla-coloured tufa stone that’s so often used in the Loire, Paris-based architect Yves Collet of the Collet & Muller practice designed the new outbuildings with weathered grey clapboard exteriors and red terracotta-tiled roofs to harmoniously blend into their surroundings. The hotel’s reception building, where the front desk is in a spruce green enclosure that recalls a hunter’s blind, also includes a picture-windowed lounge with overstuffed tobacco-hued leather furniture and a fireplace. “Beyond its magnificent châteaux, the Loire Valley is also known as the garden of France for its farms growing superb fruit and vegetables, and that fecundity has made it one of the world’s great wine regions as well. “This rural agricultural identity is what inspired architect Yves Collet and my wife, Alice, when he designed the hotel’s new › CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 37
