5 HOTEL DE VOUGEOT
Burgundy

It would make an excellent stopoff on the long drive south, but this place deserves rather more of your time. Wood- and stone-built sobriety gives way to contemporary comfort surprising at such prices, especially in these surroundings. The Vougeot, with its old walls and young owner, puts you at the heart of some of France’s most expensive landscapes: Clos de Vougeot is but a grape-spit away, while other Burgundian aristocrats of the Côtes de Nuits and de Beaune are scarcely further. You could spend a week here quite easily. The wine would help, of course.

Doubles from £62; 00 33 3 80 62 01 15, www.hotel-vougeot.com

6 HOTEL DIDEROT
Loire

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In the Loire, you don’t want to stay somewhere modern. That would be wrong. You need a place where the corridors weave and creak, where there’s an aroma of polished old wood, and there’s always someone in the kitchen making jam. You require the Diderot, an essentially 15th-century spot hidden in Rabelais’s little town of Chinon. The rooms combine properly heavy furniture with a lightness of touch. Through spring and summer, the garden is overcome with flowers; the welcome is as if you had fallen among your oldest friends — and the jams are first-class.

Doubles from £45, though those at £58 and £63 justify the extra; 00 33 2 47 93 18 87, www.hoteldiderot.com

7 HOTEL CHILO
Basque Country

Dangerous spot, the French Basque country. I’m not talking bombings, just that the more you get to know it (mountains, gorges, pasturing sheep, millennial links between man and land) the more you never want to leave. Chilo, in Barcus, a village too remote for radar, is a bright white farmhouse overhauled for sophisticates, with a wonderful restaurant that spills out into the gardens in summer. Within, refined rustic rooms are woven into the old fabric; without, unmistakably Pyrenean foothills and farming fill the view and the senses.

Doubles from £55; 00 33 5 59 28 90 79, www.hotel-chilo.com

8 HOTEL DU ROY D’ARAGON
Corsica

Down on the chic waterfront of Bonifacio in Corsica, £43 won’t buy you much. Look above you, though, and you’ll see the salmon-coloured facade of the Roy d’Aragon — airmail-blue shutters and white wrought-iron balconies completing a frontage that you’ve imagined every time you’ve read a Poirot novel. Interiors are Ikea chic, but the location in Corsica’s loveliest harbour town mitigates the flatpack feel.

Doubles from £43, or from £69 for sea view; 00 33 4 95 73 03 99, royaragon.corsud.org

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