Hotel de la Coupole: Exploring Sapa’s stunning French-Style Hotel
A French-inspired hotel has interiors that feel like you have fallen through the looking glass – all while surrounded by a stunning alpine landscape.
The six-hour drive from Hanoi north to Sapa is slow but beguiling. Streetside food vendors are busy even on the city’s outskirts, arranging those tiny plastic stools that challenge big Western bottoms while old men suck on long pipes of thuoc lao, a wild tobacco our local photographer jokes is known as “Vietnamese weed”.
The city eventually peters out to give way to an emerald-green countryside cuffed by distant mountains. Time slows, as does traffic, ambling along the modern but not very “express” highway. At Lao Cai the busy traffic is left behind for a 45-minute steep and winding climb into the mountains, nudging passed lumbering vans and buffaloes. Deep in the valley, shimmering rice terraces appear sculpted from gold.
It’s almost dusk when we eventually potter into Sapa, a bustling mountain tourist town that feels a little like Bali’s Ubud. That’s until we spy Hotel de la Coupole, part of the MGallery Collection. A transplanted St Moritz springs to mind. Or perhaps Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel.
This is the only international five-star hotel in town (for the moment) and it is enormous, topped with three cupolas and painted a vivid mustard yellow. Teetering on a ridge above a deep valley with glorious mountain views in all directions, the impressive building is plucked straight from the French colonial playbook. A century ago, Sapa was a popular hill station retreat for the French as they fled the heat of Hanoi for the “Tonkinese Alps” to live among the “hill tribes”. Administrative offices were moved to town for the entire summer. Today it’s a popular base for trekking, with dramatic trails winding through lush valleys to tiny villages that seem set in aspic, courting tourists with beautiful hand-stitched fabrics and tribal jewellery.
Sapa nestles in the shadow of Mount Fansipan, the roof of Indochina, a very dramatic backdrop by any reckoning. Even so, the outsize scale of the hotel feels improbable, as do the Alice in Wonderland interiors by acclaimed designer Bill Bensley. He calls the hotel “an enchanting palace in the clouds”, and his layered design is influenced by Sapa’s hill station history and the region’s richly embroidered tribal fabrics and clothing, which in turn influenced Paris fashion.
Charming hotel general manager Peter Neto (a shout out to his adorable dachshund, Miss Daisy) says a 1930s tribal bamboo hat covered in polka dot fabric, found in the Paris flea markets by Bensley and now displayed in the soaring lobby, inspired the entire hotel fit-out. So, tribal fashion meets haute couture.
That polka dot hat is accompanied by banks of large bobbins with jewel-coloured threads, stacks of old trunks, riding boots and yet more hats suspended from the ceiling.
Bensley spent seven years scouring those Paris flea markets to fit out the 249-room hotel (a surprisingly small inventory given the scale of the building), and the details are dizzying. Every lift is a jewel box, the children’s playroom a fairy floss-pink circus-themed fantasy, the huge indoor swimming pool, or Le Grand Bassin, a Great Gatsby extravaganza surrounded by enormous Art Deco-style statues of divers.
Hundreds of vintage fashion illustrations adorn walls; chairs are upholstered in tribal fabrics; lamps decorated with tribal jewellery and pompoms. In the enormous Chic restaurant, which like so many of the hotel’s public spaces is Versailles in scale, two-dimensional mannequins march down a central catwalk. Crockery is stamped with Coupole’s insignia in the manner of a colonial-era hotel, adding to the sense that it’s been here at least a century rather than six short years (including a Covid mothballing).
The interiors sometimes verge on the surreal, especially after downing the hotel’s signature cocktail featuring absinthe and a local chrysanthemum flower. It’s the tipple de jour in the glamorous Absinthe bar (Bensley’s favourite space) and after a few sips I become convinced the stuffed civet cat, perched atop a mannequin sporting a vintage fur coat, is moving.
The guestrooms are no less impactful. Mine, 825, opens onto a large, tiled balcony bookended by classic columns and offering dreamlike views into the valley. All rooms have balconies with views over the town, mountains or into the immense courtyard garden. As dusk draws down, cloud spills into the valley swaddling the rice terraces for the evening. With the French doors open, the sounds of the town keep me company; a church bell, the hubbub of scooters, music from a bar.
We are at altitude, but the weather is warm; the scent of cinnamon, grown locally, wafts into the room. It’s easy to understand why the French fell for this lovely place. When I venture out for dinner, soft jazz is playing through the hotel’s enormously wide corridors, further cementing that feeling we have travelled back in time.
Each of the deluxe suites is named for a fabric, I’m in Organza, which reminds me of Great Aunt Hilda. I have mannequins made into lamps, the shades trimmed with tribal jewellery and wall panels covered in tribal fabrics. It all makes me want to go shopping, which in this part of the world can be combined with a vigorous mountain trek. Local guide Chu meets us after breakfast for a six-hour walk into the valley, especially lovely at this time of the year when rice is golden and ripe for harvest.
The descent is steep (there’s a hair-raising shortcut via some vertiginous steps) to the river on the valley floor; we pass wallowing buffaloes, women harvesting rice with small scythes and children tasked with turning the drying rice laid out on plastic sheets by the river. Young boys flick the grains with their bare feet in the manner of bored children the world over. Our destination is Lao Chai village where the bumpy road is lined with little tourist shops selling fabrics and other trinkets. Chu is keen for me to experience local crafts rather than buying the machine-made fabrics that dominate market stalls. She takes me to meet a tiny old woman weaving hemp on an ancient loom; tubs of indigo sit ready for dyeing. In the courtyard, rice is being husked in the traditional way, a rivulet of water powering a wooden fulcrum and pestle that slowly pounds the rice, producing a couple of handfuls a day.
And then back in Coupole’s elegant day spa, the lovely Noi is filling Japanese-style timber bathtubs with warm salty water laced with some 70 local herbs and botanicals. This signature Red Dao herbal bath is just the thing for weary hiking legs, and highly recommended.
For non-trekking sightseers, the hotel is directly connected to a funicular that in turn links to a cable car crossing the valley and scaling Fansipan, all three built and owned by the Sun Group, one of the largest property developers in Vietnam; its portfolio includes hotels, resorts and large-scale attractions.
With plans to transform Sapa into a major tourist attraction (it’s already very busy), the Sun World Fansipan Legend complex has a Disney-esque flavour. Think ye olde funicular, Viet-Vegas gardens featuring a giant topiary mammoth, and little mountain ponies waiting patiently to be hired for a photo-op. But the views from the cable car, the longest non-stop three-rope cable car in the world, are incredible and upon arriving at the mountain top, an elevation of more than 3000m, there are hundreds more steps to the giant Buddha, spookily obscured by cloud.
Mountain walking builds an appetite, but Coupole’s head chef, Oliver Mette, is on the case overseeing a mostly French menu using local ingredients: black chicken, farmed sturgeon and rainbow trout, farm-grown cacao. (At check-in guests are welcomed with a delicious cup of local hot chocolate.)
Dinner can also be taken offsite in a little village, made for tourists but an interesting insight into the ethnic minorities that live around Sapa, including the Black and Flower Hmong, Red Dao, Tay, Giay and Xa Pho. Each has wonderfully intricate and colourful clothing.
It’s easy to understand how Parisian couturiers became bewitched by these hand-embroidered fabrics. And wonderful to see how Bensley has celebrated their beauty in this singular hotel.
More to the story
Part of the Accor group, the MGallery Collection brings together more than 120 boutique hotels worldwide, each with historic or architectural significance or a special setting. The brand works with local communities, especially women, and through its partnerships with NGOs promotes health programs (including breast screening) and entrepreneurship. In Vietnam, MGallery operates seven hotels including Hotel de l’Opera Hanoi, a two-minute walk from the city’s Opera House. It is presently undergoing a gradual refurbishment with theatrical interiors that celebrate its locale. The impressive eight-storey atrium restaurant has a stage where black-and-white French movies are screened every afternoon.
In the know
Hotel de la Coupole is centrally located, an easy stroll from Sapa’s cafes, restaurants and walking trails. The hotel is a five- to six-hour drive from central Hanoi, four hours from the airport or an eight-hour train journey to Lao Cai. Rooms from about $400 a night.
Christine McCabe was a guest of MGallery Collection.
If you love to travel, sign up to our free weekly Travel + Luxury newsletterhere.
