Lauren Tilton
Google
This is not a 5-star hotel and certainly not worth the €500+ per night price tag.
The grounds are beautiful, but the property is run like a simple bed and breakfast (later searching revealed that it was classified as one until 2019). The owners live on the property and run most aspects of the hotel, including the food service, themselves. This can be a lovely experience, but not here. The couple moved from the Netherlands as a semi-retirement from previous careers and treat the grounds first-and-foremost as their home. There are numerous spoken and unspoken rules that they expect you to follow so that you might have the “privilege” of staying on their property.
For example, picnics are not allowed anywhere, despite the presence of over a dozen of picnic tables and the lack of any alternative dining options some nights of the week. They also have posted signs that there is €15 corkage fee, even for bottles enjoyed privately in your own room, despite not having a real bar at the hotel. In a futile attempt to follow this rule, we asked about our own wine for dinner on the second night, expecting to be able to pay the corkage fee and enjoy a local bottle we had purchased. Instead, we were admonished loudly and embarrassingly in front of other guests with: “Do you not understand how restaurants work? You’re American so that must be why you don't understand.” Many high-end restaurants and hotels all across France allow the droit de buchon, particularly those located in wine regions.
To understand the attitude that will great you here, I suggest going through the responses to the negative reviews posted here and other sites (something I wish we had done as well). The owners often try to turn the issue into the fault of the reviewer; on more than one occasion, they even resorted to posting unnecessarily personal attacks back at their own guests.
For the price of this hotel, you could stay at almost any other high-end countryside hotel in France (such as the Relais & Châteaux properties or Les Domaines de Fontenille) that are run by professional staff with high levels of expertise, service, and hospitality. Our experience at La Borde did come close to matching our experiences at these other properties. I strongly suggest that others avoid it as well.
