Faventia, the Latin word for Fayence, is the domain of Executive Chef Phillippe Jourdin, previously of La Tour D’Argent in Paris and the nearby Le Moulin de Mougins. Dining there is, as one would expect, a gourmet experience. Our particular menu included Phillippe’s ‘Duck foie gras, two ways’ with its delicacy of taste that I could not begin to describe adequately, and a glass or three of Chateau d’Aurilhac, Cru Bourgeois, Haut-Medoc, 1999. Exquisite. Regretfully, I had to politely turn down the offer of a visit to the hotel’s Spa to benefit from the full treatment, including a recuperative massage from Nadine. Likewise there was insufficient time to sample the locality’s many lifestyle-enhancing opportunities, such as the home of French parfumerie at Grasse. Vineyards and Alpine winter sports are also easily reachable. This, I faithfully report, is an accurate account of the here and the now, and since the sun is shining from a clear blue winter sky, and the temperature rising encouragingly from a frosty break-of-day, there are few places one would rather be.

It was not always like this, however. The wonder of it all is that there is a hotel and golf course at all on the enviable Terre Blanche site, a 45-minute drive inland from Nice-Cote-d’Azur Airport, gateway to French Riviera millionaire playground of Cannes, Monte Carlo and St Tropez. Some 10 or so years ago, when a similar project first reached public consciousness, and Sean Connery and US golfing legend Jack Nicklaus headed the interested consortium, a citizens committee from the ancient villages of Fayence and Tourrettes, manned the ramparts to repel what they feared would be a Hollywood-style assault on their
traditional rural tranquillity.

In this they succeeded, as this particular 007 assignment failed at the planning permission stage. A similar attempt by a Swedish group was also greeted by a response of ‘Merci, messieurs... mais non!’ It was a happy combination of circumstances more recently that provided the breakthrough, though not without further justifiable soul-searching by the local residents and the expenditure of sums of money requiring lines of zeros. Deitmar Hopp, a founding member of the computer software giants SAP, had seen the site and mentally stored it as the ideal situation to one day build his dream golf course. At much the same time he happened to seek a holiday round of golf at La Manga, Spain, and was told that the day’s starting sheet was full. This convinced him that it was time to stop dreaming and to start working on the idea of his own course. Dave Thomas had by then built a second course for him at Heidelberg, one with which he was more than pleased with, and thus the process that led to the completion, during 2004, of the golfing nirvana that now graces France’s menu of upmarket facilities, was underway.