Five reasons to head to Le Sud this summer
A vineyard walk, a Saint-Tropez family house, a wicker atelier on the Rhône and a small island freshly returned to Bandol: summer stops where the South of France is making room for art and design well outside the gallery walls.
The South of France has spent a long time defined by its light and its coastline; this season, these openings suggest the region's cultural life can be found just as easily inland, on a river quay or a few minutes offshore, and none of it requires a gallery booking.
Five addresses, scattered between the Luberon, the Var coast, the Rhône, the heights above Cannes and a seven-hectare island off Bandol, make for a pleasingly varied cultural season. Paintings meet stained glass in a Romanesque priory; design takes over a Saint-Tropez house older than the resort town's reputation. Wicker returns to a Rhône village once sustained by willow. Ceramics inhabit a Couëlle landscape-house above Cannes and Bendor reawakens with a welcome residue of parties, ateliers and glass workshops beneath the hotel polish.
Les Davids, Haute-Provence
Les Davids sits high above the Luberon at 600 metres. The estate has been a working vineyard for some time, and earlier this year it opened a 2.5km promenade designed by Bas Smets, the Brussels-based landscape architect responsible for the Luma gardens in Arles and the surroundings of Notre-Dame de Paris. The route moves through eight distinct atmospheres, from oak forest and garrigue to lavender, olive grove and vineyard rows. Smets began with the territory already in front of him, drawing the path from the estate’s working ground, where vineyard rows give way to scrub and tree cover.
Newly installed works by Tomás Saraceno, David Nash, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Lionel Sabatté now punctuate the walk, giving this phase of the estate the feel of a collection dispersed through planting, agriculture and woodland. At its centre is the Théâtre de Verdure, a natural amphitheatre inaugurated in 2024 and used for Les Estivales du Haut Calavon, the summer programme of concerts and readings.
Yves Zurstrassen keeps a studio on the estate, and nine kilometres south, at the Musée de Salagon in Mane, his Variations rouges is installed until 14 December 2026. The Belgian painter made the series in dialogue with Salagon’s Romanesque church and Aurélie Nemours’s stained-glass windows, completed in 1998; his vertical reds meet stone, glass and southern light at close range.
Une Maison à Saint-Tropez, Saint-Tropez
For a fourth edition of Une Maison à Saint-Tropez, Isabelle Castanier returns to her family house at 17 avenue Foch, on Place des Lices. The building dates to 1789, its front door opening straight onto the square. From 6 June to 31 July, the house becomes the setting for Souvenirs d’enfance, an exhibition shaped around four childhood scenes: the cabin, the afternoon snack, bath time and the bedtime story.
Axel Chay anchors the goûter with a low cast-aluminium table inlaid with semi-precious stones, a new development in his work that reads as precious and playful at once. Around it, Sarah Espeute's textiles, glassware by Nienke Sikkema and Bernard Heesen, and Lucie Sotty's ceramics fill out the table. Marianna Ladreyt, who transforms discarded beach inflatables into objects using leather-craft techniques, made the parasol for the outdoor cabin scene. Jorge Suárez Kilzi presents a flower-shaped bar with petals that open like a corolla, drawn from the chouchous-beignets carts that once worked the Saint-Tropez beaches.
It sounds playful because it is, though Castanier's touch keeps the sentiment in check. Objects sit close to daily life, rooms remain recognisably rooms, and Saint-Tropez appears through the rituals of a family summer. The exhibition is open daily from 10am to 1pm and 4pm to 8pm, with late openings on Thursdays until 10pm.
isabellecastanier.com
La Maison Vime, Vallabrègues
Vallabrègues is a good place to remember that wicker once had an economy of its own. In the 18th century, the Rhône-side village counted hundreds of wicker workers among its inhabitants, with willow from the river feeding a busy local trade. Atelier Vime now occupies the Hôtel Drujon, built in 1730 and later home to a workshop installed in 1878, complete with a courtyard and soaking ponds for fresh wicker.
On 23 May, Anthony Watson and Benoît Rauzy reopened La Maison Vime for the summer season. The shop runs until 12 September at 24 Quai du Rhône, with furniture, lighting, editions, vintage pieces, glassware and ceramics arranged through the house. It first appeared in 2022 as the atelier’s summer address, dedicated to the Vime world and its particular art de vivre; by now, its return has become part of the village calendar. Go for rattan, table linen, lamps, older pieces and the pleasure of seeing craft history still attached to an address.
ateliervime.com
Dragon Hill, Mouans-Sartoux
In the heights above Cannes, on Chemin de Castellaras in Mouans-Sartoux, Dragon Hill is the work of Jacques Couëlle, the French architect-sculptor who worked in clay and plaster maquettes, producing curved, cavernous interiors with no straight lines to speak of. His landscape-houses on the Côte d'Azur, and the resorts he designed for the Aga Khan on the Costa Smeralda in the 1960s, remain among the more singular pieces of 20th-century domestic architecture. The estate now operates as a residency and sculpture park, with permanent works by Antony Gormley, Tony Cragg, Claudia Comte, Thomas Houseago and Alicja Kwade, curated by Maxime Combot.
From 13 May to November 2026, the house hosts Inhabiting the Landscape House, a site-specific exhibition by ceramicist Olivia Cognet, open by appointment. From Nice and now based in Vallauris, where she has taken over Roger Capron's former studio, Cognet works across ceramic, lava, stone and metal at scale, from tables and lamps to monumental bas-reliefs. For Dragon Hill, she has made works for the cavities and curves of the Couëlle interior: a sculptural tapestry sofa produced with Lyon upholsterer Atelier Dégut for one of the living rooms, and an outdoor garden lounge of monolithic stone chairs and tables set among the planting. Brancusi, Noguchi and Gio Ponti are her stated reference points; Couëlle, this season, is the room she is in.
instagram.com/dragonhillresidence
Zannier Île de Bendor, Bandol
A few minutes by boat from Bandol, Île de Bendor reopened after a five-year transformation by Zannier. Paul Ricard bought the seven-hectare island in 1950 and treated it as a miniature Mediterranean republic, complete with theatre, gallery, diving centre, wine museum, sculpture garden and glassmaking workshop. Dalí came, as did Joséphine Baker, Fernandel, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Mireille Darc and Youri Gagarine; the old photographs are reason alone to visit.
The property reopens as a 93-key hotel, arts destination and wellness retreat, with Delos, Soukana and Madrague Houses forming separate addresses within the same small territory. The spa covers 1,200 sq m; the Rēsonance programme offers bioresonance, movement, vitality and beauty; restaurants and children’s programming make it open to all. In June, Bendor hosted a Fête de la Musique celebration, with boats running back to Bandol until 11.30pm. Bendor still has the charm of a place imagined in miniature: close enough to Bandol for an easy crossing, to witness the island returning to itself.
