The road into the Gavarres climbs through cork oak and pine until the tarmac gives out. Mas Oms is where it stops: a 15th-century masía in a quiet valley, with the hills on one side and a long view towards the coast on the other.
Julien and Céline left France with their children to make it a hotel. The restoration took a year. The idea had been with them for more than a decade before that.
The six rooms are named for trees. The pool sits at the edge of the terrace and seems to float over the valley. There is no one else in sight, and no sound of traffic.
A small hotel near the Costa Brava but far from the summer crowds.
Julien has worked in restaurants and hotels since he was fifteen. He went on to run his own restaurant, and natural wine has been his subject for years. It is still on the list at Mas Oms.
Céline came to cooking later, seven or eight years before the move, and it took hold fast. She opened a shop selling local products and food to take away, and it became the kind of place people talked about. The food was plant-forward and filling. Healthy, without tasting as if it were trying to be.
The third strand came from neither job. Over the ten years before they left France, the two of them trained in reiki, energy work and aromatherapy. The hotel they kept talking about was always going to have room for that: food, rest, the hills, a yoga mat for anyone who wanted one, and no obligation for anyone who didn't.
What finally moved it was a change in Julien's work. The gap it opened up was also a deadline. Their eldest son was eleven, and every year they waited would make it harder to uproot the family. If they were going to do it, it had to be then.
The sensible plan was to work in someone else's hotel first and learn the trade from the inside. They looked at what they already had between them, the years in kitchens and dining rooms, a food shop that worked and a decade of training, and skipped that step.
They moved to Catalonia and found a farmhouse in the Gavarres, inside the protected natural area between Girona and the Costa Brava. They spent a year on it. Mas Oms opened as a hotel with six rooms.
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The restoration kept the arched stone ceilings and the old timber beams. The rooms are done in neutral colours and natural materials, comfortable rather than showy, and each takes its name from something that grows on the land: Olivera, Figuera, Buganvília, Alzina, Prunera. The largest, the Llimona suite, sleeps five and has its own sitting room.
The estate runs to about ten hectares of oak woodland, meadow and vegetable garden. Near the house are a small stone chapel and what is left of a watchtower.
It is set up to be lived in rather than looked at. Guests can use the kitchen. There are corners for reading, spots in the garden for meditation, hammocks strung between holm oaks and olive trees, a long terrace and a heated saltwater pool facing the valley.
The hills are good for e-bikes, trail walks and the via ferrata. The beaches of the Costa Brava are about twenty minutes by car. Close enough for a swim in the sea. Far enough that the summer crowds stay there.
Breakfast is the thing people remember. It is ordered from a menu rather than laid out as a buffet, brunch-style and generous, and built mostly from plants: protein-rich, with bread and cakes from the house oven and vegetables and herbs from the garden. Two past guests, Benjamin and Roxanne, called it "healthy, varied and fresh." Accurate, and an undersell.
Julien and Céline used to cook the dinners themselves. Now a partner couple runs the evenings, cooking to the same principles: largely plant-based, never austere, with natural wine to go with it. On their own website the hosts put the aim in five words: "allying healthy eating and pleasure."
Plenty of guests arrive with no plans to change how they eat. They tend to leave having eaten more vegetables than usual without missing the rest. The treatments work the same way. Massages, yoga, reiki and energy flow sessions are all there to book. Nobody is going to suggest one.
Massages, yoga, reiki and energy flow sessions are all there to book.
Many guests book one anyway, out of curiosity.
The first idea had been something closer to a permanent retreat, where people came specifically to rest and do the inner work. Julien and Céline worked out early that it would not pay its way, not yet, so they opened as a small hotel instead: good rooms, a serious breakfast, treatments for anyone who wanted them.
The retreats came back in through another door. In winter, when the hotel closes, they lead their own programmes of four or five days, built around energy work, rest and long conversations, sometimes with outside teachers they choose themselves. The programme goes by the name YAM! The exchanges on those days, they say, are what nourishes them most.
Then the season's guests go back down the hill, and the house fills again with people who have come for something else. The tarmac still stops at the door.