Jean-Prosper Gay-Para may have named his new hotel after one of the longest surviving cities on earth, Byblos, located just up the coast from his native Beirut, but his ownership of the property didn’t survive more than a few weeks. The ensuing story of how the Byblos Hotel in Saint-Tropez went on to kickstart the entire Brigitte Bardot, jet-set-infused fable of a former fishing village metamorphosing into the Côte D’Azur’s haven of hedonistic excess is the stuff of legend.
Beirut in the 1950s and 1960s was a smoldering cauldron of over-indulgent, under-the-radar, pleasure-seeking, louche espionage and legendary nightlife of which Gay-Para was the undisputed overlord. Into his nightclub, Les Caves du Roy, enters Brigitte Bardot, for whom alone the newly minted epithet ‘sex symbol’ could have been coined, propelled along by her newfound fame as the star of the 1956 movie And God Created Woman, which is where modern Saint-Tropez really begins.
The hitherto suave uber-confident king of the night is rapidly reduced to a goggle-eyed poodle in the face of B.B.’s searing sexuality, and with a few tugs of the leash, Gay-Para is soon trotting around Saint-Tropez, desperate to capture the heart of the woman who’d clearly stolen his. The masterplan? To construct a hotel worthy of the One Thousand And One Nights in Bardot’s adopted hometown, complete with a Caves du Roy replica that would have her swooning into submission in no time.
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By the time of the glamorous three-day-long 1967 opening of the Byblos, however, Bardot was already married to German playboy Gunter Sachs. Sachs had also opted for the dramatic gesture approach, but his showering of Bardot’s back garden with hundreds of rose petals from a hovering helicopter was not only more expedient but, crucially, it was also successful. While Bardot did make it to the opening of the Caves du Roy later that year, she paid scant attention to its owner.
As Gay-Para began processing this unanticipated catastrophe, what would become known as the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors erupted. Heavily enmeshed in Lebanese politics and business, and needing to return to Beirut immediately, he was suddenly in search of a buyer for the hotel he’d only just unveiled.
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Step forward Sylvain Floirat, who’d left his remote Dordogne village aged 11 to become an apprentice cartwright, but who’d subsequently embarked on one of those remarkable rags-to-riches trajectories that had transformed him into one of France’s wealthiest men by the 1960s. Few could navigate their way around a deal better than Floirat, and in the same instant that Gay-Para’s ill-fated amorous adventure came to an abrupt end, Sylvain Floirat emerged as an unwitting hotel and club owner.
Fast forward a generation or three, and I’m seated next to the Byblos pool in the summer Tropezian sunshine across the table from Antoine Chevanne, CEO of Groupe Floirat since 2006, as that hallowed French institution otherwise known as lunch unfolds with, what else? A judiciously selected Provençal rosé. Chevanne is Sylvain Floirat’s great-grandson and effuses a laid-back air, possibly inherited from his famous antecedent.
What he has most definitely inherited, though, is the Byblos, and appearances aside, Chevanne is the master of all he surveys. His great-grandfather may have needed to hit the ground running as Jean-Prosper Gay-Para hurtled back to the Middle East, but for over half a century, the Byblos has flourished as one of the most iconic and fashionable hotels on Earth. As for the Caves du Roy, it might not have achieved its intended aim with Saint-Tropez’s resident A-lister (Bardot still lives there), but the list of celebs who’ve been ushered through its famously difficult-to-breach doorway ever since is a long one.
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From Mick Jagger, who married Bianca Perez at the Byblos in 1971, and Grace Jones, who famously posed on the hotel’s celebrated ceramic stairway, to Beyoncé and George Clooney, they’ve all rolled on by for their Byblos baptism at some point. Present a famous name, and Chevanne will invariably respond with an anecdote. His story about being called into Les Caves du Roy to deal with a bare-chested and over-excited guest with his shirt wrapped around his head takes a bit of beating. The resultant friendship forged with Bruce Willis (after he’d been persuaded to put his shirt back on) over the course of what sounded like a very long night remains one of Chevanne’s more enduring memories from inside the club.
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Gay-Para’s original design concept was of a Provençal village interconnected by little squares and walkways tumbling down the hillside towards Saint-Tropez’s Place des Lices. Though the property has expanded, this enduring image of a village within a village remains as endearing now as it was at the hotel’s inception. Chevanne’s mother, Mireille, who has served as the principal designer for many years, was responsible for the decision to paint the previously natural stone buildings in a multitude of pastel Provençal colors.
She also deployed her innate sense of style and art de vivre à la française throughout the interiors of the Byblos – not least within the hotel’s most desirable offering, the Missoni Suite. She is, Chevanne explains, great friends with Rosita Missoni, matriarch of the Missoni dynasty, which clearly explains the collaboration behind the unmistakably Missoni-inspired suite of rooms overlooking the pool.
But Antoine Chevanne has friends of his own in the design world, and as Mireille starts to take what one suspects might be a reluctant back seat, Chevanne has just embarked on a major new project with Parisian interior designer Laura Gonzalez. The widely-acclaimed maximalist is currently in great demand from clients such as the Saint James hotel in Paris, where she’s overseen a truly spectacular renovation, to Cartier, whose Fifth Avenue Mansion is one of the jeweler’s several outlets to have been given the Laura Gonzalez treatment.
Gonzalez, who has previously cited Iris Apfel as a personal style icon, also recently debuted an NYC outpost at Galerie Laura Gonzalez in Tribeca and continues her burgeoning assault on the Big Apple with fabled Parisian department store Printemps, scheduled to open at 1 Wall Street in early 2025.
At the Byblos, she’s unveiled four totally remodeled suites and rooms as the first step towards a radical redesign of the hotel’s accommodation. Channeling the Byblos’ 1960s and 1970s DNA, yet skilfully synthesizing it with cutting-edge contemporary elements, the first impressions imply something seriously game-changing. With meticulous attention to detail, an openness to historic and cultural sensibilities, and a constantly fomenting creativity, Gonzalez, operating from her new Maison Particulier powerhouse in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, is very much the designer du jour.
Having grown up on the French Riviera, her understanding of Provençal design, history and culture is well-ingrained, while her personal relationship with Chevanne means Byblos is already a familiar environment. The design template, as exemplified by the newly presented rooms, Gonzalez explains, is inspired by the Provençal simplicity of a traditional Tropezian home.
Envisioning Saint-Tropez fishermen returning home to Pierre Frey-covered walls and dining off original Roger Capron ceramic tables before turning down the Barracuda of Comporta wall lights and flopping into a Gonzalez-designed armchair exquisitely finished in Thorp of London fabric might require a leap of the imagination. But we can, of course, see where she’s coming from.
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All the remodeled rooms have a large upright minibar covered in tiles from Vallauris, the nearby town with a long history of ceramic production, and inspiration is drawn from the huge travel trunks that the moneyed classes were still using in the 1970s. They’re just one of many Laura Gonzalez designs especially conceived for the Byblos, which she mingles with repurposed furniture like old rattan tables and chairs, along with commissioned work such as the hand-worked marquetry embedded into a bathroom door that I found myself marveling at. I was informed it required an entire week to craft.
Like a maestro conductor corraling the different members of an orchestra toward a musical masterpiece, Gonzalez somehow manages to coalesce all of these disparate design themes into an irrepressibly romantic reflection of Saint-Tropez, the Côte D’Azur and the Byblos’ own illustrious, celebrity-strewn journey. Once replicated across the rest of the hotel’s accommodation, it’s almost certain that the overall effect will be transformative.
The Byblos is one of only 31 hotels in France accorded “Palace” status. Unlike the Grande Dames of Paris who hog the majority of Palace accreditations and actually do resemble palaces, the Byblos, with its deliberately laid-back informal interpretation of glitz-free glamor and curious higgledy-piggledy design, seems an unlikely member of the club. However, as with its owner, lightly worn first impressions conceal very serious intent.
As Chevanne plops a lump of ice into his already pale glass of rosé, rendering it almost translucent, one wonders what he sees through the years ahead as he steers this most revered of Riviera institutions into the 21st century. Last year’s remodeling of the Sisley spa has met with universal acclaim, as has the recently opened Byblos Beach restaurant, with plans for that very 1970s-looking swimming pool apparently also imminent.
But unleashing the formidable creativity of Laura Gonzalez, a designer functioning full throttle at the peak of her powers, is an inspired move. La Vie en Rosé looks set to continue unperturbed for a good while yet.
