Evok Collection, the French hotel group behind Nolinski and Brach, has confirmed its first resort property: Nolinski Golfe de Saint-Tropez, due to open in April 2027 at Gassin, on the hills above the gulf. The former Mas de Chastelas, a historic Provençal mas set within three hectares of landscaped gardens, is being reworked into a 55-room hotel, the brand’s first move outside a city after Paris and Venice.
The development stays tightly held. Pierre Bastid owns both Zaka Investments, the real-estate company leading the project, and Evok Collection, the operator that will run the finished hotel, keeping construction and operation under one roof rather than splitting them between a developer and a management contract. Famille C Participations, the investment fund of the Courtin-Clarins family, sits alongside as a strategic shareholder in Evok Collection, lending the project a financial backer with deep roots in French luxury.
Gassin is a knowing choice. The hilltop commune sits just back from Saint-Tropez, close enough for the harbour and the beaches while a step removed from the crush, and it already has form at the top end: the Althoff Villa Belrose, a Leading Hotels of the World property with one of the finest views over the bay, has drawn a discreet crowd to the same hills for years. The designer Nathan Litera is adapting Nolinski’s design language, clean lines and considered materiality, for the Riviera setting, with the brand describing a programme that shifts through the day, from family-oriented mornings to a more adult register after dark.
Plans for the property include a spa and wellness centre, a kids’ club and teen zone, and a padel and tennis club. All 55 rooms and suites come with their own terrace, a detail that matters more on the Riviera than almost anywhere else, where a terrace functions less as an amenity and more as the point of staying at all.
The pool arrangement follows the same logic: two pools, at 18 and 33 metres, splitting lap swimming from a more social, loungers-and-conversation space rather than asking one body of water to do both jobs. It’s a small piece of programming that suggests the operators have thought through how a family actually moves through a resort day, not just what amenities a brochure should list.
It’s the first of three confirmed Nolinski addresses worldwide, joining Paris and Venice, and one piece of a larger push: Evok has flagged further openings across the Alps, Ibiza, Milan, Lake Como, the Amalfi Coast and Capri as it works toward a target of around 15 hotels across both its Nolinski and Brach brands within five years.
The bet is that Nolinski competes on design and atmosphere rather than on the beach-club spectacle that has defined the Saint-Tropez peninsula’s loudest properties for decades, and that Gassin’s elevated, gulf-facing position gives it enough geographic distance from the port to make that case. Visit Nolinski here.
