Our first Mediterranean address is open in Saint-Tropez. Here is why we went south, and why it was never really a departure at all.
There is a particular kind of company we keep. Our guests arrive in Verbier for Christmas or New Year, return for the February weeks, sometimes steal a quiet March visit when the snow is at its best and the crowds have gone. Then the season turns, and they head where the year takes everyone eventually: south, to the water.
This summer, for the first time, we are already there.
The Prize of Pampelonne is our first Mediterranean address, minutes from the most storied beach in Saint-Tropez, and it marks the moment Koja d'Or stops being a winter company with a summer pause and becomes what we always intended: one standard, the whole year round.
It would be easy to call this expansion, but that is not quite the right word. We have no ambition to be everywhere; quite the opposite. Our conviction has always been that a small number of exceptional chalets and villas, operated exclusively and known intimately, will always outperform scale. What changed is not the philosophy but the map. We looked at the calendar of the people we serve and accepted an obvious truth: their year does not end when the lifts close.
There is a rhythm to that year, and anyone who lives it will recognise it instantly. The Alps in deep winter. A city interlude in spring. Then the long southern summer, June to September, when life moves to the coast: boats, beach clubs, dinners that start late and end later. The same people who want the chalet running silently around them in February want the villa running silently around them in July.
The addresses change but the expectations do not.
That continuity is the entire point. The guest who knows our team in Verbier will find the same standard waiting in Saint-Tropez: the private chef who has already read the family's file, the concierge who booked the beach club before anyone asked, the sense that the villa simply works. One team, one standard, two seasons. You will not re-explain your children's allergies or your preference for how the morning should begin. We already know.
Saint-Tropez was the natural place to begin. It is where the winter world goes in summer, a stretch of coast whose relationship with our mountain villages is practically a commute. The faces on the Pampelonne sand in July are the faces from the Place Centrale in February. We are not entering a new market so much as following our guests home for the summer. And while the story of our summers will not end on this coastline, it could only have started here.
The Prize of Pampelonne is open, and the first season is already under way. The mountains will be waiting when the air turns in November, and so will we. But for now, the year has moved south, and for the first time, we have gone with it.