Culture
A Look Inside Château de la Messardière, the Filming Location for the New Season of The White Lotus
Inside Château de la Messardière, the Airelles palace above Saint-Tropez where season four is filming now, and what makes it worth the trip in real life.
The White Lotus has a way of choosing well. Hawaii, Sicily, Koh Samui, and now the French Riviera. Season four of the series is filming at Château de la Messardière, the Airelles palace on the hill above Saint-Tropez, with the Plage de Pampelonne below. We stayed at the château last summer, the year before the cameras arrived. This is what makes it worth the trip in real life.
A château first
The Messardière began as a love story rather than a hotel. It was built in the late nineteenth century by a cognac merchant as a wedding gift for his daughter and her husband. By the turn of the century it had passed into hotel life, and in the 1920s it became one of the legendary addresses, when Parisian society first made its summers in Saint-Tropez. In 2012 it earned the Palace distinction, the official rank France reserves for its greatest hotels.
In 2019 it joined Airelles, the collection behind Les Airelles in Courchevel and La Bastide in Gordes, and reopened in 2021 after a renovation that returned the château to its original idea, a private estate that happens to receive guests.
The hotel today
Eighty-six rooms and suites sit in a thirteen-hectare estate above Pampelonne Bay, the largest grounds of any hotel in Saint-Tropez. The tables run from La Table de la Messardière to Matsuhisa, Nobu Matsuhisa’s Riviera outpost, with a Cédric Grolet pâtisserie on the terrace. Down on the sand, Jardin Tropezina is the hotel’s beach club, with the kitchen under the direction of Jean-François Piège. The Spa Valmont, among the largest in the Mediterranean, covers a thousand square meters, with an exceptional gym alongside. The hotel itself keeps a summer calendar, open from late April to the middle of October.
Before the season airs
Filming runs through 2026, with a story set on the Riviera during the Cannes Film Festival. What the series will do for the Messardière is easier to predict. It has a record of filling the hotels it films, for years, from Taormina to Koh Samui. But Saint-Tropez never needed the introduction.
The air date has not been announced, though a shoot that wraps in October points to 2027. Until then, the château receives guests, as it has for a century. There is still time to see it before television does.
