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With a summer Eurostar service to Avignon and Ryanair flights to Nîmes, far-western Provence is now easily accessible to UK holiday-homemakers. For sophistication, the theatres of Avignon, the galleries of St-Rémy-de-Provence, the antiques markets of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue and the Michelin-star restaurant in Les Baux-de-Provence are hard to beat, while the Roman arena of Arles and the wild and haunting plains of the Camargue are just a few kilometres to the south. Further east, the coffee-table-book villages of Pernes-les-Fontaines, Lourmarin, Bonnieux and Goult hover on hilltops above fertile countryside that defines the Provençal ideal.
The tiny village of Maillane, just seven kilometres north of St-Rémy-de-Provence, is not, at first sight, the most obvious choice of base from which to explore the Bouches du Rhône region. It is certainly never going to win any of the pretty-village awards beloved of Provençal authorities. Yet it is quiet, unpretentious and friendly, which is more than can be said for some of its more flouncy neighbours. The village has one claim to fame: it is the birthplace of Nobel Prize-winning writer Frédéric Mistral, and his house is now a little museum. It has three cafés (Lou Souleu does a good set lunch), one decent restaurant, L'Oustalet Maianen, and a butcher, bakery, newsagent and tobacconist. A good florist is perhaps your first indication that Maillane is concealing something else under its rustic bushel.
Behind a high wall on a shady village road, the elegant, 19th-century bastide Bambou is one of the village's best-kept secrets (the other is the chic guesthouse, Mas des Abbayes, up the road). Bambou is spacious for a village house, with four bedrooms and a 'family suite' of two interconnecting rooms on the top floor, one of which is a twin-bedded children's room. It was recently professionally renovated and decorated to a very high standard, and the present owners are very conscientious in its upkeep. The peaceful ground-floor living areas comprise a beamed living room with roomy sofas and an open fireplace, a large kitchen-diner, a more formal dining room and a winter 'snug'. The gravel-and-paved courtyard garden, overlooked only by the bastide's shuttered windows and wrought-iron balconies, is well-planted with bamboo, lime trees and evergreen shrubs; there is a fountain and an old-fashioned bassin d'eau plunge pool.
SLEEPS
10-12
PRICE
£2,390-£4,070 per week, including maid service. Babysitting, cooking, massages and tours are also available Contact: Bambou Provence (07771 757 374; email: mailto:stay@bambouprovence.com; www.bambouprovence.com).
FLY
Ryanair (0871 246 0000; www.ryanair.com) to Nîmes (32km away)
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