The best surf & design hotels · Biarritz & the French Basque Coast
Les Hortensias du Lac
Les Hortensias du Lac was built as an Art Deco Landaise villa in the 1930s — the lake on one side, the Landes pine forest on the other, La Gravière five hundred metres away. Renovated in 2019 by designer Beryl Le Lasseur for the Fontenille Collection, the grand piano was kept, the emerald-tiled infinity pool was added above the lake, and twenty-five rooms were built around the logic of the original house rather than in spite of it. Hossegor is the most surf-focused town on the French Atlantic coast and the WSL Championship Tour break is close enough to hear on the right days. The hotel arrives at the question of what to do with a great Landes villa and answers it correctly.
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The hotel
The Design
A 1930s Art Deco villa on the lake. The grand piano was kept. The emerald pool was added. The logic held.
Beryl Le Lasseur's renovation preserved the bones of the original villa — the volumes, the relationship between the building and the lake — and built the twenty-five rooms around them. The pool sits above the water, the forest rises on the other side. The kind of result that takes longer to get right than starting from scratch.
The Design
A 1930s Art Deco villa on the lake. The grand piano was kept. The emerald pool was added. The logic held.
Beryl Le Lasseur's renovation preserved the bones of the original villa — the volumes, the relationship between the building and the lake — and built the twenty-five rooms around them. The pool sits above the water, the forest rises on the other side. The kind of result that takes longer to get right than starting from scratch.
The Surf
La Gravière is five hundred metres away. The WSL has been coming here since 1987.
Hossegor holds the heaviest beach break in Europe. La Gravière pulls Atlantic swell onto a shallow sandbar and produces reef-quality tubes on a sand bottom — the reason the Quiksilver Pro ran here for over thirty years. North and south of the main break, the coast offers options for every level. Capbreton's jetty is ten minutes away.
The Surf
La Gravière is five hundred metres away. The WSL has been coming here since 1987.
Hossegor holds the heaviest beach break in Europe. La Gravière pulls Atlantic swell onto a shallow sandbar and produces reef-quality tubes on a sand bottom — the reason the Quiksilver Pro ran here for over thirty years. North and south of the main break, the coast offers options for every level. Capbreton's jetty is ten minutes away.
The Food
A chef with three-Michelin-star training, cooking on a lake in Hossegor. It is not the obvious place to find that.
The restaurant draws on Landes and Basque produce — foie gras, Côte de Boeuf, seasonal fish — prepared with the precision of someone who came here from a more decorated kitchen and decided this was where the ingredients were worth cooking. The terrace faces the lake. It is one of the better meals on this stretch of coast.
The Food
A chef with three-Michelin-star training, cooking on a lake in Hossegor. It is not the obvious place to find that.
The restaurant draws on Landes and Basque produce — foie gras, Côte de Boeuf, seasonal fish — prepared with the precision of someone who came here from a more decorated kitchen and decided this was where the ingredients were worth cooking. The terrace faces the lake. It is one of the better meals on this stretch of coast.
