There are islands that exist principally on maps, and islands that exist principally in the imagination. Île de Bendor, a seventeen-acre scrap of limestone and pine anchored seven minutes by boat from the harbour at Bandol, has spent the better part of a century belonging to the second category. Tomorrow, when Zannier Île de Bendor opens its doors for the first time, it will attempt something more difficult still: to belong to both.
The story of Bendor begins, as so many good Mediterranean stories do, with a man of outsized appetites. Paul Ricard, the Marseillais industrialist who made his fortune bottling pastis, bought the island in 1950 when it was little more than bare rock and scrub. Within a decade he had conjured from it a kind of private republic of pleasure: a harbour, a diving centre (France's first), galleries, gardens, a village of whitewashed houses clustered around a square that felt borrowed from the Cyclades. Salvador Dalí came. Josephine Baker came. Yuri Gagarin, improbably, came. Bendor was the sort of place that attracted people who understood that paradise is always, at some level, a construction.
Then the decades did what decades do. Ricard died in 1997. The buildings aged. Concrete crept. The gardens grew unruly, then unkempt, then wild. By the time the Ricard family and Zannier Hotels announced their partnership in 2021, Bendor had become a study in beautiful neglect — the kind of ruin that makes architects weep and developers salivate.
The restoration
What has emerged from five years of painstaking work is neither a museum piece nor a ground-up reinvention. The team has removed the worst of the late-twentieth-century concrete, installed rainwater collection systems throughout the island, and planted two hundred new trees — Mediterranean pines, olives, citrus — to restore the canopy that once shaded Ricard's promenades. The result is ninety-three rooms distributed across three distinct hotel concepts, each calibrated to a different mood of island life.
Delos, named for the sacred Greek island that no mortal was permitted to be born or die upon, is the most recognisably “hotel” of the three: sixty rooms done in a clean 1960s Riviera style, all terrazzo floors and linen curtains and the particular shade of blue that the French call bleu Klein when they are feeling intellectual and bleu méditerranée when they are feeling romantic. Soukana turns its attention inward, toward stillness and wellbeing. The rooms are quieter, the palette earthier, the views oriented toward the island's interior gardens rather than the sea. And Madrague — five standalone family houses with private gardens and their own entrances — offers something rarer: the illusion of owning a home on an island you share with almost no one.
“To arrive at Bendor by boat is to understand immediately what Paul Ricard saw seventy-five years ago — an island that belongs to no era, and therefore belongs to all of them.”Camille Ashworth
The table
Dining on Bendor has been entrusted to Lionel Levy, the Michelin-starred chef behind Une Table au Sud in Marseille, who has been given the rare luxury of designing not one restaurant but eight distinct dining concepts across the island. There is a bouillabaisse restaurant that treats the dish with the ceremonial gravity it deserves — tableside service, saffron-stained broth ladled from copper pots, rouille made fresh each morning. There is poolside dining of the sort that requires nothing more demanding than a glass of rosé and a bowl of grilled prawns. A wine bar, intimate garden dining beneath canopies of jasmine, and several concepts that Levy describes, with the particular confidence of a chef who knows his audience, as “still evolving.”
The body and the spirit
The spa occupies 1,200 square metres — an extraordinary footprint for an island this size — and is organised around four pillars: wellbeing, spa, movement, and nutrition. Eight treatment rooms include a honeymoon massage suite with views that seem designed to make single travellers briefly reconsider their life choices. There are indoor and outdoor pools, a hammam, cold bath, mud bath, balneotherapy facilities, an Iyashi dome for infrared detoxification, and studios dedicated to meditation, yoga, and Pilates. Outside, a tennis court and three pickleball courts acknowledge that wellness, for some, requires a competitive element.
The legacy
Ricard's cultural ambitions have not been forgotten. A gallery and three artisan ateliers continue the tradition he established, offering residencies and exhibitions that connect the island to the broader artistic life of Provence. It is a gesture toward something that most luxury hotels merely gesture at: the idea that a place might nourish the mind as generously as it pampers the body.
For Zannier Hotels, known for the architectural poetry of Bãi San Hô in Vietnam, the temple-garden serenity of Phum Baitang in Cambodia, and the stately reinvention of 1898 The Post in Belgium, Bendor represents both their most ambitious project and their first Mediterranean property. It is, in a sense, a homecoming — the Belgian hospitality group arriving at last on the sea that invented the very concept of the luxury resort.
Bandol itself sits forty minutes east of Marseille, close enough to feel connected to the cultural weight of France's oldest city, far enough to feel that you have genuinely escaped. The seven-minute boat crossing is deliberate: long enough to shed the mainland, short enough to never feel like a logistical burden. By the time the harbour of Bendor comes into view — the restored buildings catching the late-afternoon light, the pines swaying in that particular Provençal breeze that smells of salt and rosemary and something faintly, impossibly sweet — you understand that what Zannier has built here is not merely a hotel. It is an argument that some places deserve a second life, and that the best restorations are the ones that know exactly what to leave alone.