About us

A villa, its garden, its kitchen

A white villa with Basque-red shutters, two streets from the ocean. We reopened it in 2019: Anaïs runs the room, Maddi the kitchen.

The grey-blue ocean under a cloudy sky, waves in the foreground

Belles Matinées? The name of the 1958 guest house.

In 1958, Anaïs’s grandmother began taking summer guests. Her breakfasts on the veranda made her name, and the guest house took the one its regulars gave it: the Belles Matinées, the fine mornings.

The salon has kept its parquet and tall windows, the veranda its cement tiles. The garden is as it was: blue hydrangeas, snowball bushes, and the smell of the ocean when the wind comes from the west.

The garden: blue hydrangeas in the sun, white snowball flowers, hydrangeas in vases, pastel petals, white tulips

The window table in the morning: orange juice, a plate of fruit, toasts, a white teapot

A table laid by the tall window, a wooden chair

The salon

An oak parquet floor, tall windows onto the garden, wooden tables and cane chairs. In the morning the light falls slantwise across the tablecloths. The flowers come in from the garden: tulips in spring, peonies in May, hydrangeas all summer.

The kitchen

Maddi and two cooks, a range, a juicer running from eight o’clock, shelves of stoneware made in Ciboure. The eggs come from Saint-Pée, the ham from the Aldudes, the chocolate from Bayonne.

Maddi’s hands holding a tall stack of pancakes

In the kitchen, an orange pressed on the board

Maddi’s rule

Everything cooked to order, everything pressed on the spot, nothing kept waiting under a cloche.

The story of the house

1924
The villa
A family from Bayonne builds a summer villa two streets from the ocean.
1958
The guest house
Anaïs’s grandmother takes in guests; her breakfasts on the veranda give the house its name.
2019
The door reopens
Anaïs and Maddi reopen the villa for brunch, Wednesday to Sunday.
This morning
The first batch
The croissants come out at half past eight, the first table sits down at nine.