A few months after returning from Hôtel Byblos, I was having lunch in London with Antoine Chevanne, a hirsute and handsome Frenchman whose buccaneering great-grandfather, Sylvain Floirat, had, in 1967, acquired the Tropézienne pleasure palace from the equally intrepid, and famously Brigitte Bardot-obsessed, Lebanese billionaire Jean-Prosper Gay-Para.

Back then, Gay-Para had only recently cut the ribbon on his fictionalised French-village-cum-Lebanese-port hotel. Built as a grandiose attempt to win over his would-be paramour (Bardot was married to Gunter Sachs at the time), the hotelier’s overblown declaration of love – flowers were never going to cut it, Sachs having recently chartered a helicopter to litter the gardens of Bardot’s neighbouring home with thousands of rose petals – ultimately proved otiose. Bardot wasn’t interested (although not so uninterested as to not attend the opening party). And when the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East, Gay-Para cut his losses, selling up to Chevanne’s great-grandfather and returning to Beirut where there were business interests to shore up.

Chevanne, sparkly-eyed and snappily dressed when I met him at The Dorchester (and in every photo I’ve seen of him since), grew up visiting Byblos with his family. He assumed the reins in 2001, the fourth generation to steer the most famous digs in central St Tropez. “Byblos was always known as somewhere you went to party,” the erudite Floirat Group chairman, and occasional art collector, told me over a plate of poached cod. “It took me 15 years to change that perception.”

For years, you see, Hôtel Byblos was to St Tropez what Pikes Hotel had been to Ibiza (albeit with a slightly more stringent door policy). Two months after Bardot, and several hundred other guests, had attended the hotel’s launch party, Gay-Para opened a nightclub beneath its swimming pool. It had been 10 years since the release of And God Created Woman, the erotic arthouse rom-com credited for aggrandising Bardot’s career and awakening the world to the charms of St Tropez, and the sun-drenched former military port was now the most voguish spot on the French Riviera.

If, by day, everyone was tucking into tarte Tropézienne around the Place des Lices, or sunbathing on Pampelonne Beach (where, in the ’60s, Helmut Newton had a field day with Bardot, and where, a decade later, Slim Aarons would train his lens), then, at night, the place to be was Gay-Para’s Les Caves du Roy (The Royal Cellars). What George Michael and Freddie Mercury did for Pikes in the 1980s, Charles Aznavour, Elton John and Liza Minnelli had done for Byblos in the ’70s.

Mick and Bianca Jagger honeymooned at the hotel. Grace Jones (who, incidentally, entered into a short-lived love affair with Tony Pike) turned up to party in a pair of boxing gloves (the internet is scant on detail as to why), ensuring Les Caves was talked about in the same breath as New York’s Studio 54 and Paris’s Le Palace.

You can still party at Byblos, if that’s your sort of thing. DiCaprio and Naomi Campbell do. Beyoncé and Jay-Z, too. But you’ll need stamina. Doors open at midnight, and you don’t want to be the first ones there. My wife and I made the fatal, middle-aged mistake of preparing for our Big Night Out with a power nap after a dinner heavy on the carbs and cachaça.

Alas, sadly, I can’t titillate you with stories of table-top dancing with Drake and P. Diddy (both of whom have stayed at the hotel). Or shock you with the price of a double G&T (guests of Byblos at least get into Les Caves for free). What I can tell you is that breakfast is served from 7am, and that if you get to the poolside buffet shortly thereafter you’ll have the pick of a smörgåsbord of meats, pastries and fresh fruit worthy of royalty – the real, or rap, kind.

Thanks to the efforts of Chevanne, and others, Byblos is no longer a nightclub with some bedrooms attached. Today, the hotel is as much about Michelin as Moët (technically, the house pour is Billecart-Salmon, but that doesn’t rhyme). Next to the pool, on top of the club, is open-kitchened Arcadia. The restaurant is overseen by the ever-present Nicola Canuti, a bonhomous Italian who spent nine years under the tutelage of Alain Ducasse. For lunch, Canuti offers bible-thick club sandwiches and prodigal lobster rolls. Dinner is an exuberant five-course jaunt around the Mediterranean. Bibendum is yet to festoon Arcadia with one of his shiny asterisks, for reasons best known to the big man himself. Presumably, Michelin’s tyre-kickers are yet to make it to this hilltop corner of St Tropez.

One man with more stars than Orion, famously, is Alain Ducasse. Having headhunted Canuti to take care of Arcadia, the Monégasque chef funnels his Tropézien efforts into Cucina, an Italian concept imported from Paris. Here, in Byblos’s second, more insouciant restaurant, wood-fired pizzas and flambéed tagliatelle are served under plane trees and floating lampshades. Go easy on the raviolis de veau if you’re set on hitting Les Caves.

Bardot gets the credit for putting St Tropez on the map. But Signac and Matisse had been capturing this shimmering coastal spot in ever larger dots half a century before. Signac came by ship; Matisse by road. In this light-drenched corner of southern France, the pointillist and the fauvist found their own Arcadia.

Chevanne’s great-grandfather didn’t get the whole Bardot thing. He was more into art. Roger Capron, the legendary French ceramicist, invented a brand-new earthenware compound for Byblos. He used it for the courtyard of what is now a Sisley spa, as well as the dancefloor of Les Caves. Above a patio door, Jean Derval created a mural of Zeus abducting Europa; apt, given Gay-Para’s original ambitions. It is now Byblos’s emblem. Capron also found the time to cover a staircase in yellow tiles. Grace Jones was photographed sitting on the balustrades back in ’77. Today, guests attempt to recreate the pose.

Byblos doesn’t look all that much in photos, it’s fair to say. Certainly nothing like France’s other 30 Palace hotels. Some modest multi-coloured townhouses – originally whitewashed and later painted in more traditional Provençal pastels by Chevanne’s mother, who still oversees interiors – around an equally modest swimming pool. But then not even Matisse could capture the sound of fountains and the smell of jasmine trees. Newton and Aarons would struggle to represent the cocooning effect of the hotel’s chic-as-a-Chanel-boutique bedrooms and suites (four of which have recently been playfully redesigned by Parisian design maestro Laura Gonzalez).

The magic’s in the small stuff. All that wisteria and bougainvillea. Andalusian tiles and antique furniture. Bay trees and towering bamboo. The not-so-mini minibars, designed to look like antique travel trunks. And that ancient Lebanese olive tree; imported by a head-over-heels Gay-Para half a century ago, which took root where Bardot’s affections did not.

It’s not all unrequited love at Hôtel Byblos. Upon our return, we discovered that my wife had been pregnant during our stay. Bit of luck we never made it to Les Caves after all.

From approx. £435 per night for a Classic Double room, approx. £675 per night for a Laura Gonzalez suite, visit byblos.com

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