On a sunny summer day in the pretty pastel-painted port of Bandol, I boarded a wooden outboard for a 10-minute trip to the 1950s. Or, rather, an artfully curated and discreetly luxurious version of this exuberant postwar decade as it was lived on the craggy island of Bendor, a privileged pleasure compound surrounded by the sweeping blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
After a five-year, $115 million renovation led by Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, the storied Provençal island reopened to the public on May 1. Its 93 rooms are distributed across two luxury hotels, Delos and Soukana, plus an area called Madrague, which includes five old fisherman’s cottages with duplex rooms. The island also has four restaurants, three bars, an art gallery, a café, pétanque courts, and a crêpe stand.
