Your hosts
Esther & Arnaud
A former nurse, an engineer with a passion for building, two children and three years of work.
The beginning
Following a path, before knowing where it led
They were looking for a house. Not an ordinary house, but somewhere open, rooted and generous: a place that would give the life around it room to grow.
They found it here: a property with an unusual adjoining outbuilding, half garage, half living space. It wasn’t beautiful, and its potential wasn’t obvious. Yet it felt right, in the way some choices do before you can quite explain them.
For Esther, that certainty came from faith: the conviction that some paths are already there before us, and some places are waiting for us. They knew it was no coincidence, even if they didn’t yet understand why. And Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye, a place of pilgrimage, care and passing travellers for centuries, surely wasn’t one either.
A change of direction
Finding another way to care
When their first daughter was born, Esther left nursing. Behind her were years spent caring for others in the most practical sense. She loved her work, but now wanted to be present in a different way.
An idea took shape: turn the outbuilding into a welcoming place offering respite to carers and the people they cared for. It would be another way to continue caring. But the regulations took the project in a different direction. As the building work progressed, the idea gradually evolved into a holiday cottage.
The building work
Built with their own hands
An industrial engineer, Arnaud had already renovated the roofs of their home. The cottage continued that work on a larger scale. Here, he made everything himself. Everything. From the roof timbers, which he cut and assembled on the ground before having them lifted by crane with a friend’s help, to the furniture and painting: it was all their own work.
Esther was there at every stage: site manager, as Arnaud calls her. The style, the decisions, the logistics, the ideas and the hands-on work.
The last nine months before opening: a pregnancy.
Their first guests arrived in April 2024, three weeks after the birth of their second child.
The name
A name that was already waiting
When it came to naming the place, one name felt right.
A fifteen-minute walk away, the abbey in Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye preserves the memory of the Hospitaliers, monks who, for centuries, welcomed sick pilgrims to heal them or care for them. Welcoming, watching over and caring for others: something of that heritage still runs through the village. And something of that calling was already part of the project, before they even knew it would become a place to welcome guests.
The dramatised tour about medieval medicine continues that connection between the history of care and hospitality.
L'Hospitalier. The name was there, and everything it stood for.
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