We started out staying with friends. We moved on to the Mercure in Beaune, a functional business hotel on the lower end of the scale. Basic, comfortable, with free broadband and within easy walking distance of the town centre. Next to Italy, where we had a week in an apartment within the 14th century Villa Pandolfini (at right). This was a return to a much loved haven for me, which I've written about before here.
At Pandolfini, we started to tip the scales to luxury. With its two bedrooms, kitchen, gracious sitting room, 20-foot painted ceilings and Renaissance-era loggia overlooking the garden, it was undoubtably more than we needed. Had we filled the other bedroom, the shared price per couple would have been the equivalent of the Mercure. With just the two of us, the cost was more equivalent to a top hotel in Florence. But then we wouldn't have had all that space and privacy. (Or the owner's family on hand to help with car problems.) Still, the overall accommodation costs weren't outrageous. Until we got to our last two nights.
On the way home, I decided to splurge. It was the Easter weekend. Nothing would be open. We were breaking up a long drive. I figured the low accommodation cost of the first week would average out in the second. And so, it was a premium room inside the Chateau d'Etoges, in the heart of the Champagne region.
If ever there was a setting for my husband to win his argument for the primacy of French culture, this is it. It is a country house hotel on a very grand scale. The chateau, a mostly 17th century confection built on the foundations of a Medieval castle, and still standing within its moat, stands in its own grounds at one end of its eponymous village. The ground floor is a procession of grand sitting rooms with a white stone entry hall with a sweeping stair at their centre. I'm not sure how many guest rooms there are (I'd guess no more than 25 or 30), but there are certainly few enough that these main rooms are never crowded. We spent a happy afternoon playing backgammon in the grand drawing room, a view of the terraced gardens across the moat out the window at our elbow. Later that evening I sat alone in the library/bar area reading for 40 minutes before dinner. When we walked the grounds ... dotted with fountains that legend says influenced a young Luis XIV ... we only ran into one other couple. And yet we knew there were other guests, as the breakfast room (buffet an additional 17 euro, but does include the local fizz) and dining room were always full.
It's not like we needed the public rooms, because our bedroom was a ridiculously large cube of perhaps 25 feet in height, depth and width. Big enough to accommodate not only the superking bed under its royal canopy, but a sofa, a big table with armchairs on either side, a big fireplace with mirror towering above it and a massive wardrobe. Remarkably, as the place suffered a lot of neglect after its Napoleonic heyday, the original delicately-coloured panelling with its inset paintings survives intact. Through a door in the corner, next to a window that towered almost as high as the ceiling, was the bathroom. Both rooms were delightfully suffused with the sound of flowing water, thanks to the fountains burbling into the moat outside. The bathroom had another window looking out to the moat and gardens, a massive marble tub and dressing table and, beyond that, another room for the toilet.
And through the room with the toilet, a first for me in hotel accommodation: a small staircase up to the servants quarters, where a third person could have been quite snug in the single room tucked into the lofted space above the bathroom.
The only drawback to all this luxury, I must admit, was the mattress. It's a real shame to be surrounded by such luxury, clamber into bed and think that your mattress at home is more comfortable.
These main chateau rooms at d'Etoges run 298 euro a night. I can justify it with my averaging over the holiday strategy, or by considering that many a perfectly average room in nice hotels in London or Paris charges as much. But there's no denying, this is eye-wateringly expensive. I wouldn't consider it unless you're planning to spend most of your time at the property, as we did, so you can really make the most of it.
The restaurant in the Orangery is very good, as discussed in the early entry on our best meals of the trip. There's a nice little spa with one treatment room, a whirlpool, a sauna and steam room. Without a pool, I wouldn't pay the fee just to use the spa, but with a treatment it's a nice place to relax, and the prices for massages were actually a bit lower than the English norm. The village has two champagne producers less than 100 yards from the chateau's gates, and you can take one of the bicycles from the courtyard to explore the surrounding countryside.
There are three other levels of rooms, from tiny ones in the chateau's attic to basic options over the orangery and something slightly nicer ... but still not as grandiose as ours ... back in the chateau. I must confess to already thinking how wonderful a return on some future long weekend would be. With all those lovely public rooms, I bet you wouldn't feel deprived in the smaller bedrooms. It's less than 5 hours total travel from home, and we didn't have any time to go to any champagne houses. Or space left in the car to buy any.
But for now, I need to turn my attention to earning the money to pay that bill.
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