Philippe Starck has kept a house on Cap Ferret for forty-five years. This month he opens a hotel on the same peninsula, imagined as the retirement cottage of a French actress who never quite left the pines.
Hotel Villa Colette sits on the boulevard de la Plage, the long sandy road that runs the spine of the peninsula. Twenty-eight rooms and suites, powder pink walls, a retractable glass roof over the dining room. It is the first five-star hotel Cap Ferret has ever had, and the first property the Utopik Collection has opened outside Paris.
Laurent Taiëb owns the Utopik Collection. He came to Starck with a brief that was really a question. What would happen if you built a hotel the way you would build a summer house for someone you loved. Starck, who has owned a place on the peninsula since 1981, took the question literally.
The fiction
The hotel has an invented biography. Starck imagined a French actress of the 1930s to 1950s era, retiring from Paris to a wooden house on the bay. She brought her piano. She kept the paper flowers from her dressing room. She bought her sheets in lemon yellow because she liked the colour at breakfast. The cottage grew around her.
The device sounds twee on paper. In the rooms, it reads as something quieter. Mahogany headboards. Pink-and-grey veined marble in the bathrooms. Ruched lampshades in warm parchment. Geometric cushions sit on beige linen chairs. Stainless steel shows up in unexpected places, small glints against the soft palette.
Pink walls, paper flowers, a 1950s Klein piano in the dining room
The rooms
There are twenty-eight keys across classic rooms and Prestige Suites. The suites reach fifty-five square metres or more. Ground-floor rooms open onto private gardens. First-floor rooms have small balconies shaded by the pines that every tourist board photograph of Cap Ferret returns to. The two Cap Ferret Prestige Suites look east across the Arcachon basin and catch the sunrise over the oyster beds.
The mood in every room is quiet. Paper flowers in ceramic jugs. A book on the bedside table that somebody might actually read. The colour of the walls changes through the afternoon, pink becoming peach becoming something close to apricot at five o'clock. Starck has done maximalism in his time. Villa Colette is a different register.
Starck has kept a house on the peninsula since 1981. This is the hotel of a man who knows which light falls on the bay and at what hour.
Juliette MarchandThe table
Benjamin Six runs the restaurant. The kitchen works international with Asian accents, which in Cap Ferret means the oysters arrive with yuzu as often as with shallot vinegar. The menu runs across breakfast, brunch, lunch, tea, and dinner. The dining room has a retractable glass roof. In April it stays closed against the Atlantic wind. By June the roof is open and the pines lean in.
The bar carries five signature cocktails, all built on the region. Pine syrup from the Landes forest. Spirits infused with immortelle and mimosa. Non-alcoholic drinks that take the same ingredients and do something quieter with them. A 1950s Klein piano sits in the corner of the dining room. Somebody plays it most evenings.
A Prestige Suite at Hotel Villa Colette, with a view of the pines
The peninsula
Cap Ferret is a sliver of sand and pine between the Arcachon basin and the Atlantic. On one side, calm water and oyster farms. On the other, a surf beach that runs for kilometres. The French Hamptons is the shorthand. In practice it is quieter than that. Wooden cabanas. Bicycles leaning against fences. Rosé at lunch. No one wears a tie.
From Paris it is three hours by TGV to Bordeaux, then an hour by car across the basin. From the Cote d'Azur it is a change of temperament as much as a change of coast. The peninsula keeps to pine trees, long breakfasts, children learning to sail, and nobody honking at two in the morning.
The context
The Utopik Collection's other properties are Parisian. Hotel Lutece, Hotel La Fantaisie, the small and specific places that sit one rung below the palaces and trade on atmosphere. Villa Colette is the first move out of the capital. Starck has designed hotels for the group before. This one feels more personal. It is the one he did not have to commute to.
The verdict
A hotel built on a fiction is a risk. Most end up precious. Villa Colette keeps the story light enough to ignore and specific enough to feel lived in. The pink is exactly the right pink. The piano is a real piano. The peninsula has finally found a hotel that understands why people keep coming back.
The Splendid Edit reports on Hotel Villa Colette in Cap Ferret, opened April 2026. Rooms available via utopikcollection.com.
Photography by Julius Hirtzberger, courtesy of Wallpaper* / Hotel Villa Colette