A bar to reinvent

In 1998, I tackled my first interior renovation: the bar. The original one had become completely outdated. Three quarters of the space was taken up by storage rooms, toilets, and an old blackened counter. Everything needed rethinking – and above all, we needed a counter several meters long.

So I hired an interior designer. It was the first and last time. Because as the meetings went on, I realized something: I had more ideas than he did. I could visualize volumes better than he could. I pictured things in three dimensions effortlessly. My father had that gift. He had drawn everything on the campsite himself: the roads, the buildings, the pitches… He was also an artist – he painted, sculpted, made pottery. I had inherited all of that artistic talent without knowing it. This project revealed it to me. From that moment on, I trusted myself.

Les Suds

The bar would be called Les Suds – a nod to the plural, Mediterranean, and multicultural South. In that spirit, I imagined a counter in blue lava stone, that particular blue you find in Morocco, Tunisia, and Asia. A master craftsman in lava stone came in person to lay it. It was an exceptional surface, and this material leaves no room for approximation. Around the counter: metal and leather chairs made in Indonesia, Venetian-inspired banquettes, Spanish-style armchairs made in Bali. And at the back, between two alcoves, a large Moroccan bread oven. I wanted a warm and convivial space. At the heart of Les Suds, there was a fireplace so that families could come for tea in the off-season, gathered around the fire.

It was with this new bar that we introduced Happy Hour – at midday and at a set time in the late afternoon. These genuine moments of togetherness still exist today and have become much-loved appointments for holidaymakers.

1,500 glasses an hour

I redesigned this bar three years ago. It was aesthetically beautiful, but fundamentally ill-suited to the work. At peak season, during Happy Hour or a World Cup match, we can reach up to 1,500 glasses per hour. The old bar simply couldn’t keep up.

So we rethought everything: something much more streamlined and functional, with three autonomous cocktail stations and integrated electronic dishwashers with automatic glass lifting. The two fireplace alcoves, however, stayed exactly where they were. They’re a decorative feature – we dress them with flowers. We also had to remove the arches because we were losing too much space. But before tearing them down, I noticed something I had never truly seen before.

Between us: My father’s arches

When I was designing the interior of that first bar, I had wanted arches. For the shape, for the volume, for the way they enlarge a space without weighing it down. Then one day, looking up, I realized what I had done without meaning to: the bar’s arches perfectly echoed the arches of the patio, the arches of the campsite entrance – the ones my father had built twenty years earlier. A thread stretched between him and me, through concrete and plaster. I hadn’t been thinking of him when I drew them, but he was there all the same.

– Aurore