VALERY GREGO: HOTEL DU COUVENT
How do you turn a 400-year-old nunnery in Nice that has been left abandoned since the late 1980s into a luxury hotel? To begin with, you need a local mayor with a vision and an individual like Valéry Grégo, a financier-turned-hotelier, to get excited by the challenge. Although Grégo doesn’t see himself as either really. He recently told the Financial Times’s HTSI magazine that he is just a person who makes a place come alive and refers to the people he is collaborating with, or employing, as “friends.” In fact, he likes to say he has fallen in love with each and every one of them: “I do hotels to bring the people I love with me, you know?” The Hôtel du Couvent was clearly a labor of love—Grégo sold off all the other hotels in his Perseus portfolio, including Le Pigalle in Paris and L’Alpaga in Megève, to fund the project. It took him and his team—including Studio Mumbai and Studio Méditerranée for the architecture, as well as Festen Architecture for the interior design—nearly a decade to restore the four buildings of the 17th-century nunnery.
A guest suite at Hôtel du Couvent
Valéry Grégo. Photographer Isaac Marley Morgan
The main breakfast room
The herbalist Gregory Unrein in the hotel’s apothecary
The result is magnifi cent. The hotel has 70 rooms and 18 suites, including an apartment with a large kitchen complete with a La Cornue stove, should guests be inspired to prepare a feast from the bounty to be found at the markets of Nice or in the property’s herb and vegetable garden. The rooms are not overly decorated but thoughtfully done—a mix of oil paintings, antiques, customized sofas, and incredibly comfortable beds. As much as guests will be tempted to luxuriate in their rooms, there is plenty to see and do within the grounds. There is the apothecary, run by the local herbalist Gregory Unrein; located in the same spot where the nuns used to run it, the shop is outfi tted with wooden drawers and cabinets fi lled with teas and local herbs. Unrein provides guests with personalized advice as well as custom tisanes, including Intestin Doux, which is sure to be a bestseller. A new bakery producing ancient-grain bread has also been built on the site of the convent’s original one. There are several pools, subterranean “Roman baths,” and a movement studio where guests can do everything from breathwork to ballet to meditation. And there are three restaurants: Le Restaurant de Couvent, the less-formal La Guinguette, and a bistro on the Rue des Serruriers, with much of the fresh, seasonal fare sourced from a nearby farm.
Indeed, Nice fi nally has a hotel that’s worthy of such an important French city—all thanks to Grégo’s passion and patience. But the hotelier is modest: “I did not build this hotel, [the building] was already here. I just helped restore it and brought in the right people to bring it back to life.”
The lounge area in a guest suite
The hotel’s lap pool
A guest suite’s dining area
PHOTOGRAPHS: GIULIO GHIRARDI AND ADRIANNA GLAVIANO
Instagram: @hotelducouvent
Text DORA FUNG
SARA RUFFIN COSTELLO: THE CELESTINE
Sara Ruffin Costello at home in New Orleans
Over a decade ago, Sara Ruffin Costello, a successful magazine editor, picked up from New York City and moved with her photographer husband and three children to New Orleans. Always a creative polymath, Costello was able to unleash her design genius here as an interior decorator, writer, fashion designer, and most recently, hotel designer. In the past few years, Costello has joined forces with the local hospitality veterans Chris Dawson and Robert LeBlanc on several projects, including The Chloe, a 14-room hotel in the Garden District, and more recently The Celestine, a 10-room property in the French Quarter just a few minutes’ walk from bustling Bourbon Street. While The Chloe has evolved into the de facto social headquarters for locals seeking an all-day alfresco retreat, with its lush backyard and pool, The Celestine (where Tennessee Williams penned A Streetcar Named Desire) is a more grown-up affair. But what they have in common is Costello’s exuberant take on Southern gothic.
A guest room at The Celestine
10: What is it like pivoting from being a magazine editor to an interior designer to designing hotels?
Sara Ruffin Costello: What job has better R&D than hotel design?! In fact, I’m headed now to Stockholm for a few nights at Ilse Crawford’s Ett Hem hotel. Crawford’s interiors exemplify how design and hospitality should work hand in glove. Aesthetics alone are great for Instagram but useless for real life. How many boutique hotels have you stayed in lately that feel designed off a trends conveyor belt? They make me want to leave! Luckily we only design projects in forgotten old buildings, where there is a devotion to restoration in the vernacular, and from a design point of view, a devotion to classicism. At this point in culture, I believe the ultimate luxury—besides good weather and good access—is permanence. A hotel that’s built to last.
10: What are the most fun rooms to design?
SRC: My work husband, Robert LeBlanc, has this funny obsession with maxing out alcoves—weird, easily forgotten spots that we turn into something—see the trellis room at The Chloe. I really appreciate that no-space-left-behind mentality. It’s funny how the tiniest spots wind up being the places people want to jam into. I suppose proximity is underrated.
My other work husband, Chris Dawson, owner of The Celestine, was rightfully obsessed with the gardenia-scented courtyard there—a respite from the cacophony of Bourbon Street around the corner. It feels transportive to sit there sipping on whatever while gentle notes waft over the brick wall from the jazz trio at Court of Two Sisters. It’s just a heavenly feeling and you could spend hours there. We made sure every room exuded this sense of being transported, which is sort of hard to do when you’re translating a feeling into actual furniture. For me that meant four-poster beds dressed with crisp linens, real architectural ceiling medallions from my local plaster guy fitted with old fans, and tons of light pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling windows that all open onto balconies. The rest of the details are personal—like hand-painted door numbers, tassels hanging from lamps, and block-print linen robes.
A colorfully painted nook at the hotel
10: Any challenges when designing these hotels?
SRC: Designing a small hotel in the French Quarter is total madness. Parking is just not an option. Whenever I had a car full of stuff to drop off, five minutes before pulling up I’d call our head of construction, Tulio, and he’d radio for five guys to dash out and form an assembly line from my trunk to the courtyard. Cars would be lined up behind me leaning on their horns. When Tulio’s guys weren’t around, I’d literally park on the sidewalk and try to bribe the meter maids with drink coupons from Peychaud’s [The Celestine’s cocktail bar]. Talk about needing some nerve pills.
10: Do guests like to steal certain objects?
SRC: Haha—a few small pieces of art at The Chloe walked out! I was in shock. We had to install museum hanging so they wouldn’t lift off the wall. I’m not surprised, though. The art is really interesting and quite valuable! My photographer husband, Paul, is part of my design team in the role of art curator—turns out he’s got a real eye for value. The collection at The Chloe is constantly getting written up. Over at The Celestine, guests love the Sorella Glenn tassels, which hang off hallway sconces and doorknobs.
10: What are your favorite hotels in the world?
SRC: In the small, affordable hotel department I love the Duc de Saint Simon in Paris and Dean Street Townhouse in London. There aren’t enough affordable small places anymore. It’s kind of crazy.
A sitting room in one of the guest suites
PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF THE CELESTINE
Text MAURA EGAN
Instagram: @thecelestinenola
ZEINA ABOUKHEIR: HOTEL AL MOUDIRA
Zeina Aboukheir. Photographer Tina Tyrell
“I wanted to go back to the beauty and the romanticism of travel,” says Zeina Aboukheir, the doyenne of the Al Moudira hotel, located on the Nile’s quieter west bank in Luxor, Egypt. Aboukheir, who is of Italian and Lebanese descent, had traveled all over the world, dabbling as a photographer and jewelry designer, before opening this veritable oasis in 2001. “Luxor is quite fantastic. The antiquities are like nothing else in the world,” she says.
The hotel has a honeycomb of courtyards filled with bougainvillea, roses, date palms, and fountains, around which are organized 54 suites featuring domed ceilings, hand-painted frescoes, canopied beds, and exquisite antiques from all over the Middle East. “I built the hotel around the furniture,” says Aboukheir, who enlisted the famed Egyptian architect Olivier Sednaoui to oversee the project. There is also an outdoor pool, a maze of gardens, and a Turkish hammam, which all offer welcome ways to relax after a day of sightseeing in the heat and dust. The elegant main restaurant—think arches, tiled floors, and chandeliers—serves excellent fusion food with Middle Eastern elements, while the colonial-style bar evokes a glamorous, bygone era.
The entrance to Al Moudira
A private villa with a plunge pool
Over the past two decades, the hotel has drawn a certain in-the-know traveler and aesthete—everyone from the fashion designer Rick Owens to the design polymath Luke Edward Hall. Once such guest was Florian Amereller, a Cairo-based lawyer and entrepreneur who booked out the entire hotel for his wife’s birthday in 2018. He was so impressed he bought the hotel from Aboukheir in 2022, but has kept her on as a consigliere of sorts. Since taking over, Amereller and his business partners have added a standalone café, a pizza oven by the pool, a book tower that he plans to stock with over 7,000 tomes from his own library, as well as a collection of private villas, some with gardens and pools.
Despite all the renovations and additions, Amereller is careful about keeping with the traditional ways of building in the region. And Aboukheir is still, as she calls herself, “the boss lady.” (It is what al moudira translates to, and what all the workers called her when the hotel’s construction started more than 20 years ago.) She is constantly working with the carpenters, weavers, and artisans to maintain the property. “She’s involved in every element,” Amereller says. Meanwhile, the new owners have even bigger plans: an organic restaurant and a working farm next door where travelers can eat with locals; artisan workshops where guests can take classes; and Set Nefru, a beautiful boat built in the 1940s for the Egyptian royal family, to take guests up the Nile. “I want to create something that is special and pays justice to this amazing country,” Amereller says.
A villa interior
An alcove for lounging
Villa Casbah
PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF AL MOUDIRA. PORTRAIT: TINA TYRELL FOR AL MOUDIRA
Text MAURA EGAN
Instagram: @moudira_hotel
