Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The main château of Domaine des Etangs Almost as soon as Domaine des Etangs became an Auberge Resort last year, it was racking up accolades. Condé Nast readers and editors ranked it the top hotel in France . Michelin bestowed two of its new Keys .
Luxury lifestyle magazines produced glowing features about the luminous nature retreat in a bucolic corner of southwestern France. None of it was wrong. But what sold me on the place was a confession from the groundskeeper and hotel archivist Jean-François Magnan.
He leads estate tours a few times a week for interested guests. When he was a boy, he roamed over the estate’s wild forests, picking mushrooms, catching fish and generally terrorizing the poor groundskeeper. “He spent all his time running after me.
I didn't know that I would become the keeper many, many years later,” he says. “So it's the irony of life. Each day, I have a little.
.. I think about all these things, and I see, of course, all these beautiful things.
This morning we have seen deer, stags, little animals, and it's the beginning of the day. It's a beautiful moment.” The Venus suite, one of the rooms in the main building His lifelong affection for the estate is tangible.
And so is that of the owner—Garance Primat, the daughter of the late French oil billionaire Didier Primat, who also owns the celebrated Primland in the Blue Ridge Mountains—and the new management company, the US-headquartered.