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First Stay: Zannier Bendor

Published

April 21, 2026

Kelcie Gene Papp

Co-Founder & Editor, Brand & Culture

First Stay is THE GOODS' guide to the world's most exciting hotel openings; reviewed for the reader who likes to arrive first.
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The Brief

Where: Île de Bendor, a private seven-hectare island seven minutes by boat from Bandol, Provence. No cars. No bridge. No itinerary unless you want one.
What: A 93-key hotel across three distinct zones — 1960s Riviera glamour, a 1,200 sq metre spa, and five private garden houses, built on the legacy of Paul Ricard, the pastis pioneer who once hosted Dalí, Gagarin and Josephine Baker on this exact stretch of Mediterranean.
Why now: After five years of restoration by the Ricard family and Zannier Hotels, the island reopens 1 May 2026. Rates from €620 including breakfast. Ricard built a global spirits empire by turning an advertising ban into a creative advantage. Bendor was where he lived that philosophy out loud, and the question Zannier spent five years answering is the one every heritage brand eventually faces: how do you honour a founding vision without turning it into a museum.

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The boat takes seven minutes. In those seven minutes a kind of voluntary divestiture happens to you: the shedding of whatever frantic palimpsest the week (or quite frankly the year so far) has written across your nervous system. You step off onto Île de Bendor and the island receives you the way only car-free places can: with absolute indifference to your schedule. There is lavender. With light displaying what designers call borrowed scenery.‍

Seventy-five years ago, Salvador Dalí was standing somewhere on this same seven hectares. So was Josephine Baker. So was Yuri Gagarin, who had recently orbited the Earth and apparently found a private Provençal island a proportionate follow-up. The island is called Île de Bendor. It opens again on 1 May 2026.

The man behind it

Paul Ricard was one of the most inventive brand builders of the twentieth century. Born in Marseille in 1909, he trained as an artist before becoming obsessed with pastis, the anise-flavoured apéritif banned alongside absinthe during the First World War. When France lifted the prohibition on milder aniseed spirits in 1932, Ricard was ready. He had been experimenting in his bedroom still, refining a recipe of star anise, fennel, liquorice, and Provençal herbs he would never disclose and that has never been replicated. He launched it as the "authentic pastis of Marseille."

By 1938 he was selling 2.4 million litres a year.

Then, in 1951, France banned advertising for aniseed drinks entirely. For most companies, a catastrophe. Ricard wrote later that it turned out to be "a secret advantage which obliged us to exercise our imagination." He designed the iconic yellow-and-blue jug - now one of the most recognisable pieces of branded glassware in France - became the first commercial sponsor of the Tour de France, and during the Suez Crisis organised a "caravan of thirst": camels carrying Ricard through the streets of Paris selling the south as a lifestyle before lifestyle branding had a name.

Bendor was where he lived all of it out. When he bought the island in 1950 it was bare rock. Within four years: a Provençal village of shaded squares and cafés, artist studios, France's first scuba diving centre, a theatre, a wine museum, and an art gallery built to house a Salvador Dalí masterpiece - Tunafishing, his largest work, painted on the island between 1966 and 1967.

Through the 1960s and 70s, Bendor did what Ricard's pastis had always done, took simple ingredients and produced something that altered the room. The guest list had the density of a party that simply forgot to end. Marcel Pagnol. Georges Simenon. Roberto Rossellini. Jean-Paul Belmondo. Josephine Baker, who had auditioned most of the world's great rooms and found this one worth staying for. Jacques Cousteau, who appreciated the diving. Yuri Gagarin (first human to leave the atmosphere) who found seventeen Provençal acres a proportionate comedown. Ricard said he only had to take the size of the place into account, "with sky and sea as the sole limits to my dreams."

Paul Ricard died in 1997. The island, like all the best parties, eventually ended. The hotels aged. Some closed. It took five years and a partnership between the Ricard family and Zannier Hotels to bring it back.

The stay

You arrive by boat, the only way in, the only way out. No cars. The sea visible from almost everywhere. You are, in the best possible way, committed.

The 93 keys are divided across three zones: Delos (39 keys, 1960s Riviera spirit), Soukana (49 keys, centred on a 1,200 sq metre spa drawing from Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine), and Madrague; five two-storey houses with private gardens near the harbour.

Eight dining spaces including the gastronomic Le Grand Large, Café Paul Ricard, a rooftop terrace, and the second outpost of Nonna Bazaar, the Mediterranean sharing-plate concept that makes a long table feel like the only reasonable place to be. There is also a crêperie, which is the correct decision.

An art gallery, three artisan ateliers, a diving centre, a beach cove. The island runs May to October, though the late September version, nearly empty, may be the real ProTip. Rates from €620 including breakfast. Suites from €1,455, transfers included. Book via zannierhotels.com/bendor.