COUNTRYSIDE

Hôtel & Restaurant
Les Prés

Saint-Hilaire-le-Châtel - France

Before it was a hotel, this was a hunting lodge, then a convent for a century and a half. It reopened in 2024 as a nine-room hotel and restaurant in the Perche, two hours from Paris, built almost entirely from what grows in the garden outside.

Countryside

Restaurant

Orchard

Pool

Living Room

Promenade

THE SETTING

Les Prés occupies a former manor known as the Domaine de Pigeon, in Saint-Hilaire-le-Châtel, a small village in the Perche — the quiet, forested pocket of the Orne department where Normandy shades into the Loire Valley, about two hours from Paris. Before the French Revolution, it served as a hunting lodge for the seigneurs de Pigeon; afterwards it passed to the Marquise de Longueil, then to the Sisters of Notre Dame de la Fidélité, who lived there for around 150 years.

The building sat empty from 2017 until Stéphane Renaud and Éric Brossard found it in 2021. They bought it in September 2022 and spent the next seventeen months restoring it — a new roof, accessibility work, and the rediscovery of a set of historic paintings in the attic, since restored and worked back into the hotel’s decor. Les Prés opened in April 2024 as a boutique hotel in the Perche, built from what the nuns and the hunters left behind, not from a fresh start.

THE ROOMS

Nine rooms and suites, split across four categories that track the building’s own layout. The two Classic rooms, tucked under the eaves with exposed beams, run about 20 square metres — cocooning, not grand, and named for what they are: “Un cocon sous les toits,” “L’atelier sous les toits.” Three Superior rooms, around 30 square metres with generous windows, spread across the first and second floors.

The two Junior Suites occupy the manor’s former master bedrooms on the first floor, original woodwork and flooring intact, with 10-square-metre bathrooms fitted with both a bath and a shower — the closest the hotel gets to grandeur. At the top of the house, two attic suites named “La Suite Loft” and “La Suite sous les Étoiles” run to 45 and 50 square metres, double-height ceilings, oak floors and a run of natural light that the lower floors don’t get.

THE FOOD

L’Orangerie, the hotel’s restaurant, sits under a 19th-century glass-and-steel veranda built onto the convent’s old gallery, its original columns still standing, looking out over an enclosed garden that becomes the terrace in warmer months. Thirty seats inside, two smaller private pavilions for groups who want their own room, and a kitchen garden and orchard just outside the door that decide most of what’s on the plate.

Chef Stéphane Renaud spent years designing restaurants and hotels for chefs including Alain Ducasse and Michel Guérard before retraining as a cook himself at the École Ritz-Escoffier in Paris. The menu is deliberately short, changes weekly, and turns over completely roughly every twenty days — roasted vegetable crumble with a honey and red-wine-vinegar dressing is something of a signature, and dessert tends toward choux craquelin in raspberry, mandarin or chocolate-coffee. The restaurant seats guests Wednesday to Saturday evenings and Sunday lunch; breakfast runs €18 and leans on the same garden.

THE STAY

The grounds do a lot of the work here: an orchard, a working vegetable garden, and a park of century-old trees running down to the Hoëne river, which cuts through the meadows below the house. The outdoor pool sits inside a pool house lined with cypress and stone, with a sauna planned as the next addition.

The whole place reads closer to a private house that happens to take guests than a conventional country hotel — worn terracotta tiles, old beams and columns left in place, antiques mixed with contemporary furniture and the restored attic paintings on the walls. It’s the kind of scale- nine rooms and a garden- where the owners still greet most guests themselves.

AROUND SAINT-HILAIRE-LE-CHÂTEL

The Perche is one of the best countryside escapes close to Paris. It is not only pretty fields. There are forests, manors, markets, antique shops, horse country, small towns, abbeys, gardens and old roads that make short drives interesting.

Saint-Hilaire-le-Châtel sits a few minutes from Mortagne-au-Perche, a Petite Cité de Caractère with a fortified history — the Porte Saint-Denis gate, the crypt of Saint-André, and 27 sundials scattered across its old townhouses. Mortagne is also the self-declared capital of boudin noir, French black pudding, and hosts an international competition for it every March; the town’s cloister of Saint-François and its small museum devoted to the philosopher Alain, born nearby, are both worth an hour.

The wider Perche is Percheron-horse country, and stud farms in the area, including the Haras de la Chéchinière, offer visits and riding lessons for anyone curious about the breed. Two old-growth forests, the Forêt de Bellême and the Forêt domaniale de Réno-Valdieu, sit within easy driving distance for long, quiet walks among trees considerably older than the hotel. Paris is roughly two hours by road; the nearest train station, Nogent-le-Rotrou, connects directly to Paris Montparnasse.

THE OWNERS

Stéphane Renaud trained as an architect and spent years designing hotels and restaurants before deciding, in his thirties, to retrain as a cook — a decision that took him from Parisian design studios to the École Ritz-Escoffier and, eventually, to his own kitchen. Éric Brossard came from a career in the medical industry and now runs the front of house, the kind of career pivot the two of them talk about openly as the reason Les Prés feels more like a shared project than a business plan.

They found the derelict Domaine de Pigeon in 2021, bought it a year later, and spent seventeen months restoring it before opening in April 2024 — a new roof, restored attic paintings, a kitchen garden planted from scratch, and a restaurant built into what was once the convent’s gallery.

GOOD TO KNOW

Style — Boutique country hotel and restaurant in a restored 18th-century hunting lodge and former convent, opened in 2024

Rooms — 9 rooms and suites across four categories — Classic, Superior, Junior Suite and Suite — from 20 to 50 sqm

Location — Saint-Hilaire-le-Châtel, Orne, the Perche region of Normandy, a few minutes from Mortagne-au-Perche

Getting there — ~2h drive from Paris; nearest train station: Nogent-le-Rotrou, with direct trains to Paris Montparnasse

Extras — Outdoor pool, working vegetable garden and orchard, park on the Hoëne river, restaurant seats 30 plus two private pavilions

Rates — From €150–160 per night; breakfast €18

Best for — Couples and food-focused travellers wanting a design-led boutique hotel in the Perche, within easy reach of Paris

THE ADDRESS