The argument for France
The argument begins in 1956, on the Côte des Basques beach below the Casino Municipal in Biarritz, where the documentary filmmaker and wave enthusiast Joël de Rosnay stood up on a board and surfed the first documented wave ridden by a French citizen on French soil. Peter Viertel, the novelist and screenwriter, had arrived in Biarritz the previous year to work on the film adaptation of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and had ordered a board shipped from California. De Rosnay borrowed it. The rest is a line of causation so straight it would be suspect in academic writing: from that board on that beach, a scene developed that by 1979 had produced the Quiksilver Pro France surf contest in Hossegor, and by the mid-1980s had concentrated the European headquarters of Quiksilver, Rip Curl, Billabong, and Volcom within a fifteen-kilometer radius of Hossegor's Plage des Culs Nus. The town of 3,700 permanent residents became, functionally, the capital of European surfing. This is the context in which France's boutique surf accommodation scene operates — and it explains, in part, why that scene is smaller than you might expect.
The geography runs roughly 150 kilometers from Biarritz in the south to the tip of the Cap Ferret peninsula in the north. The coast is not uniform. South of Bayonne, the Pays Basque supplies volcanic headlands and coves; the Côte des Basques itself is a north-facing beach below red-ochre cliffs, the wave shaped by the headland into a consistent shore break. Biarritz sits here, with Anglet immediately to the north — a longer, more exposed stretch of beach break with eight distinct sections across roughly five kilometers from La Chambre d'Amour south to Marinella. Then Capbreton, where the Gouf de Capbreton — a 3,000-meter-deep submarine canyon beginning 900 meters from shore — delivers deep-water groundswell directly to the beach, giving Le Prevent and the Estagnots point an unusual consistency for a beach break environment. North of Capbreton is Hossegor proper: La Gravière, Les Estagnots, La Nord, the beachside neighborhoods that produce the steepest and heaviest beach break in Western Europe outside of a handful of storm-dependent Brittany spots. La Gravière, on the right swell direction, is a legitimate big-wave venue. The 2011 Quiksilver Pro France ran at La Gravière in twelve-foot surf; Kelly Slater won it. Then north again, through Vieux-Boucau, Mimizan, Lacanau — each with its own beach break, its own population of local surfers, progressively thinner infrastructure — to the Bassin d'Arcachon, the tidal estuary that separates the Landes coast from the Cap Ferret peninsula, which is not a surf destination but is a design destination serious enough to require a section of its own.
The two architectural languages of the region divide along the same north-south axis. South of Bayonne, in the Pays Basque, the vernacular is the villa basque: white-rendered walls with exposed colombage half-timbering painted in dark red or deep green, a steeply pitched hipped roof in Roman tile, deep overhanging eaves. This is not ornament — it is a specific response to the Pyrénéen climate, the heavy rainfall and the Atlantic wind, that evolved over several centuries and then was formalized into a neo-regionalist aesthetic during the Belle Époque expansion of Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz as seaside resort towns for the Franco-Spanish bourgeoisie. The grand hotels of Biarritz — the Hôtel du Palais, the Régina — are this language at scale: the same roof geometry, the same color relationships, inflated to eleven floors and fitted with Belle Époque ornament. Contemporary architects in the Basque zone still work with these forms, sometimes literally — the néo-régionaliste movement has produced a generation of Basque villas that read as traditional from a distance and reveal their contemporary detailing only up close. North of Bayonne, in the Landes, the vernacular shifts to the ferme landaise: low-pitched roofs in flat Roman tile, walls in exposed brick or rendered lime, the whole mass sitting under a canopy of maritime pines that were planted by the million in the mid-nineteenth century as a government scheme to stabilize the coastal dunes. The pine forest is not a landscape feature. It is an engineered environment, and the architecture within it responds accordingly: the best Landes buildings are low, horizontal, embedded in the forest floor rather than elevated above it.
The seasonal logic matters and is routinely misread. Summer — July and August — is when the crowds arrive: Hossegor fills with surf-camp students, La Gravière is photographed extensively and surfed intermittently, the restaurants have waits, the accommodation is fully booked six months in advance and priced accordingly. The surf in July and August is inconsistent. The Atlantic southwest requires North Atlantic low-pressure systems to generate real swell, and summer low-pressure systems in this latitude are infrequent and weak. September changes this. September and October are the swell months: the North Atlantic gale season begins, the groundswell windows open, La Gravière comes alive, Parlementia on the Basque coast below Guéthary starts producing the kind of long-period swell that has made it one of the premier big-wave venues in Europe. The surf industry runs the Quiksilver Pro France in late September for exactly this reason. And the crowds are gone. The accommodation is half-price, the water is still warm from summer, and the people in the water know what they are doing. The visitor who plans France for August is optimizing for the wrong variable.
The boutique accommodation scene's small scale is a structural fact rather than a gap in the market. France's Atlantic coast is subject to the Loi Littoral — the 1986 coastal law that prohibits new construction within 100 meters of the shoreline and requires any new development beyond that to be continuous with existing urbanized zones. This effectively froze the coastal inventory in the mid-1980s. What exists now is what was built before 1986, and what has been renovated, converted, or redeveloped within the existing footprint since. The surf-camp model — buy or lease a house inland, run week-long programs for twenty students, keep costs low — found the right shape within these constraints and dominated the accommodation landscape for thirty years. The boutique tier, which requires architectural investment and a price point that can support it, has been slower to develop. By 2026 it exists, but it is thin. The properties that meet the bar are exceptional. The bar is why there are not more of them.
I. Hossegor & the Landes
The Surf-Industry Heartland
Hossegor is not a town that needs introduction in this collection's readership. The point is what exists beneath the industry layer — the surf brand headquarters, the late-September contest crowds, the van-park ecosystem that services the European surf migration every August. The boutique tier here is genuinely interesting and has been produced almost entirely by independent operators who understood the architectural resources of the Landes landscape before the wider hospitality market did.
A geographic note for orientation: Hossegor-proper sits on the north bank of the Boudigau channel, which separates it from Capbreton to the south, with the Lac d'Hossegor — a tidal lake connected to the ocean — forming the eastern boundary. The lakefront is a distinct zone from the beach: quieter, more residential, lined with the pine-forest villas built by the Hossegor Club in the 1920s and 1930s. It is on this lake that the region's most established design property operates.
Les Hortensias du Lac
The building was here before surfing was. Les Hortensias du Lac occupies a Belle Époque lakefront property on the eastern shore of the Lac d'Hossegor, a position it has held since the interwar period when Hossegor's villa community was established. The recent renovation, attributed to designer Pernette de Borrekens, worked with the existing structure rather than against it: the period bones — high ceilings, tall casement windows, the particular proportion of Belle Époque resort architecture — are preserved and corrected, not erased. The palette moves toward bleached linen and warm plaster rather than the overwrought restoration that marks a certain category of French hotel renovation. The result reads as contemporaneous with itself: a building that knows what it is and has been brought to a better version of that thing.
The property has twenty-four rooms organized across the main building and a lakeside annex, plus a pool and a terrace restaurant that faces the water. The lake itself is the key material condition: tidal, calm except in strong southerlies, ringed by pines on the eastern shore. The beach — La Gravière and the contest zone — is a fifteen-minute walk west across the isthmus. This is the right distance. Hossegor's beach can be overwhelming in September during the contest period, and the Lac position gives guests an exit. You can watch the contest in the morning, walk back across the isthmus for lunch, and spend the afternoon on the terrace without hearing the PA system.
Les Hortensias is the reference point for the Landes boutique tier. It is not a surf hotel in the programmatic sense — there are no board rentals, no surf guides, no lesson packages — but it sits in the epicenter of European surfing and knows it. The restaurant has always been a draw independent of the accommodation; the wine list leans Bordeaux with the geographical logic that applies, and the kitchen handles the regional seafood (coquillages, sole meunière, the local oysters from the Bassin d'Arcachon) with more restraint than the tourist strip south of the lake. For Hossegor as a base, this is the correct hotel.
Visit Les Hortensias du LacLes Échasses
The architectural proposition at Les Échasses is precise: raised wood-and-glass villas on pilotis in the Landes pine forest, each elevated above the forest floor, oriented to capture the canopy light and the particular silence of the maritime pines. Saubion is a village seven kilometers inland from Hossegor, and the property sits within the forest rather than at its edge — the pines are the landscape, not a backdrop. The stilts are not ornamental. The Landes forest floor floods in winter; elevating the structures keeps them clear of groundwater and produces the secondary effect of a continuous underfloor view of forest and fern that gives the villas their characteristic quality.
The construction logic is timber-frame and glazing, with large sliding doors that open the main living spaces to the canopy on two sides. The interiors are warm without being decorative: exposed structural timber, linen, a restrained palette of natural materials that reads as Scandinavian discipline applied to a French forest context. There are around twenty villas of varying size, from studios to family configurations. The pool is in the forest clearing. The restaurant serves Landes regional cooking: duck confit, foie gras, the pine-honey desserts that are the hyperlocal variant of the regional sweet tradition.
Les Échasses is the most architecturally committed small boutique in the French southwest as of this writing. The stilt construction — referencing the traditional Landais shepherds who walked on wooden stilts, the échassiers, to cross the marshy forest before the nineteenth-century drainage works — gives the property a conceptual grounding that goes beyond surface aesthetic. This is the Landes vernacular pushed into a form that is contemporary without being ironic about it. For those in Hossegor for the surf, the drive is twelve minutes; for those who want the pine-forest experience with occasional beach excursions, Les Échasses is the primary reason to be in the Landes at all.
Visit Les ÉchassesThe surf-brand geography merits a brief note for those unfamiliar with it. Quiksilver established its European headquarters in Hossegor in 1984; Rip Curl followed in 1988; Billabong and Volcom later in the 1990s. The concentration was self-reinforcing: board shapers followed, surf schools proliferated, the international surf press built its European bureau in or near Hossegor, and by 2000 the town had a density of surf-industry infrastructure — engineers, photographers, athletes, marketing departments — that had no European equivalent. The contest, the Quiksilver Pro France (now running under various title sponsors), has been held on the Hossegor beach in the September-October window annually since 1992, interrupted only by the COVID suspension of 2020. The World Surf League events draw the global professional circuit to La Gravière for two weeks every autumn. This infrastructure shaped the accommodation market in a specific way: it created demand for mid-term rentals (brand employees, athletes in training camps) and large group accommodations (surf camps, contest-week teams) rather than design-forward boutique hotels. The boutique tier came later, pulled by the wider European travel market discovering the coast rather than by the industry that built it.
Two additional properties in the Hossegor-Capbreton zone are worth noting without full profiles. Atlantic Surf Lodge, operating in Hossegor, represents the high end of the surf-camp-to-boutique transitional tier: small-group format, design-aware interiors, surf programming that is more curated than the typical camp. Verify current operation and room count before booking; this category of property has seen significant turnover since 2020. Domaine de Fompeyre, inland near Barsac in the Bordeaux wine country, is a wine-estate accommodation that is adjacent to this collection's scope rather than within it — worth naming for extended Landes itineraries that combine the coast with the appellations east of the Garonne, but not a surf hotel by any reasonable definition.
II. Biarritz & the Côte des Basques
The Heritage Core
Biarritz is the founding city of French surfing in all relevant senses. The Côte des Basques — the long north-facing beach below the cliff-walk and the casino — is where the practice arrived in the 1950s and where the Biarritz Surf Club, founded in 1959, developed the first generation of French surfers. The city is now large enough to have multiple surf zones: the Côte des Basques proper is the main beach, generally gentle and wind-affected; Grande Plage and Miramar are the central beaches in front of the casino district, more exposed; the Chambre d'Amour, at Anglet's northern end, is a different wave character altogether. The surf that matters to this collection's calibration of "serious" is Parlementia and Belharra, both accessed by boat from Guéthary or Saint-Jean-de-Luz further south: Parlementia is an outer-reef right-hand point that draws comparison to points in the Canary Islands for its geometry; Belharra is a deepwater slab that breaks in eight-to-fifteen foot surf on the correct northwest swell and has attracted the full apparatus of European big-wave surfing, including jetski-assisted tow-in teams and the annual Vague d'Or competition in the right conditions. Avalanche, another outer reef south of Biarritz near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, operates in the same extreme-swell window.
The accommodation options here bifurcate sharply between grand hotel and rental apartment. The gap in the middle — the genuinely design-serious boutique property in a 10-to-30-room format — is real and has not been fully filled.
Hôtel du Palais
The Hôtel du Palais is not a boutique hotel. It is a palace — Napoléon III built the original structure as the Villa Eugénie, a summer residence for the Empress Eugénie de Montijo, in 1855, and the site has operated as a hotel in various forms since 1893. The current building, largely rebuilt after a fire in 1903, is Second Empire monumental: a vast pale-stone facade on the Grande Plage, red-tile mansard roof, the works. It is included here not because it fits the boutique brief but because it is the architectural anchor of Biarritz's surf-cultural history. The surf that Joël de Rosnay and the first French surfers rode in 1956 and 1957 was on the Côte des Basques beach, directly below this building. The contest scene that grew in Biarritz in the 1960s — before Hossegor absorbed it — used this coast. To omit it from a France surf chapter would be a different kind of error from including it.
The Hôtel du Palais operates as a grand palatial hotel under Hyatt's Unbound Collection. It is, by any measure, expensive. The rooms facing the Grande Plage and the Atlantic are the point; the interior rooms are not. The thalassotherapy spa, the heated seawater pool, and the restaurant under the glass rotunda are all operating at a consistent level for this category of French palace hotel. Surfers staying here are not typical guests; they are guests who wanted the historical weight of the address and are using it as a base for the Côte des Basques and the outer reefs further south. This is a defensible choice. It is not a boutique choice.
Visit Hôtel du PalaisRegina Experimental Biarritz
The Experimental Group — the Paris-based operator that has produced Experimental Cocktail Club and a string of boutique hotels across France, the UK, and Italy — brought their format to Biarritz with the Regina Experimental. The building is the Hôtel Regina, a Belle Époque landmark on the Plateau de l'Atalaye overlooking the Rocher de la Vierge — a neo-Basque pile of painted render and tile roofing in the full villa basque tradition, built at the moment when Biarritz was asserting a regional architectural identity as counterpoint to the French Empire aesthetic of the Hôtel du Palais. Experimental's renovation kept the shell and rethought the interior: the result is a property that operates in the boutique tier without losing the historical mass of the building it occupies.
The Experimental Group's aesthetic signature — vintage furniture sourced with genuine editorial discipline, a bar program taken seriously as a hospitality department in its own right, a certain looseness in the common spaces that resists the stiffness of the traditional French grand hotel — works in Biarritz because the city is not stiff. Biarritz has always had an edge that the palatial hotels understate: it was a party town in the Belle Époque, a Hemingway town in the 1920s, a surf town from the 1960s forward. The Regina Experimental's bar program lands correctly in this history. The property is within walking distance of the Côte des Basques; a board can be rented from any of the several surf shops in the Plage des Basques neighborhood below the cliff. Verify current room count and restaurant status before booking — Experimental properties have varied in their food and beverage programming across locations.
Visit Regina Experimental BiarritzA note on Biarritz as a base versus Hossegor as a base: these are functionally different trips. Biarritz is a city — 25,000 permanent residents, an airport (BIQ, Biarritz Pays Basque Airport, with direct connections from Paris CDG, London Gatwick, and several European hubs), restaurants and nightlife independent of the surf calendar. Hossegor is a village that becomes a town in contest season and empties in winter. For a week's trip in September or October, Biarritz gives you the urban infrastructure and the Basque cultural layer alongside the surf; Hossegor puts you closer to La Gravière and the contest zone but removes the city. For the big-wave reefs at Parlementia and Belharra, the access point is Saint-Jean-de-Luz or Guéthary, which are thirty minutes south of Biarritz — within range of either base.
III. Anglet & Capbreton
The In-Between Coast
Anglet is the stretch of coast that most visitors pass through rather than stay in. It runs approximately six kilometers between Biarritz's northern boundary and the Capbreton channel, a continuous exposed beach with eight named sections from Marinella in the south to La Chambre d'Amour in the north. The wave quality is real — Anglet has produced more French professional surfers per capita than any other section of the Basque coast, and the beach-break training environment across the Marinella, Les Cavaliers, and Sables d'Or sections has been the working ground for European competitive surfing for four decades. The accommodation, however, has historically been mid-range resort: the large hotel complexes that serve summer family tourism, not the boutique tier.
Capbreton, immediately south of Hossegor across the Boudigau channel, operates in a different register from its neighbor despite the kilometer of distance. The Gouf de Capbreton — the submarine canyon — means that the water in front of Capbreton is genuinely deep within a short distance of shore, and the swell that comes through Le Prevent and the Estagnots breaks with a consistency and period that a pure beach-break environment doesn't produce. The town itself is a working fishing port, the only one on the Landes coast, and this gives it a functional character that Hossegor's surf-brand overlay has removed from the immediate beach area of its neighbor. The market, the port-side bars, the fish landed off the boats — this is the Capbreton that is worth a day even outside the surf season.
The boutique accommodation here is thin. L'Hôtel de la Plage in Anglet and several small properties in the Capbreton port area represent the upper end of what exists; none of them reach the architectural standard of the Hossegor or Biarritz properties profiled elsewhere in this chapter. This is a gap that the Loi Littoral constraints and the mid-range tourism economy of Anglet have preserved. The right approach for a surf trip to this section of coast is to base in Hossegor to the north or Biarritz to the south and drive the Anglet-Capbreton section daily; both are under twenty-five minutes. We flag the zone as one to watch for new independent boutique development without being able to profile a specific property at this edition's standard.
IV. Northern Landes & the Gironde
Lacanau, Carcans & Cap Ferret
North of Capbreton the coast becomes less documented and more consistent: longer distances between towns, continuous pine forest, beach breaks that work in the same swell windows as Hossegor but without the contest crowds or the brand infrastructure. Lacanau, 90 kilometers north of Hossegor, hosts its own World Surf League Qualifying Series event — the Lacanau Pro — and has a wave character very similar to the mid-Landes breaks: sand-bottom beach break, consistent in swell season, crowded at the main peak and empty 500 meters in either direction. Carcans, a further fifteen kilometers north, is quieter still. Neither has developed a meaningful boutique accommodation tier; the pattern of rental houses in the pine forest, gîtes, and campings continues here as it does throughout the Landes coast. We note both as context rather than as destination picks for this collection's editorial standard.
Cap Ferret is a different proposition. The peninsula extends south from the tip of the Médoc into the mouth of the Bassin d'Arcachon, with the Atlantic on the west and the sheltered estuary on the east. The surf on the Atlantic side — the so-called Plage de l'Océan — is real and consistent and crowded in the right swell season. The culture of Cap Ferret is not surf culture; it is the Parisian summer-residence culture, the August migration of families from the 16th arrondissement who have owned or rented the same pine-forest house for three generations. Architects come. Food comes. The oyster beds of the Bassin d'Arcachon are accessible by boat. The design quality of the independent properties here is serious in a way that has nothing to do with the surf market.
La Maison du Bassin
La Maison du Bassin is the most-cited independent boutique property on the Cap Ferret peninsula, operating on the estuary side of the village in a converted maison de pêcheur format that has been extended and refined over several years. The property is small — verify current room count, which has been reported variously as eleven to fourteen rooms depending on the season and configuration. The interiors work in the southern-French coastal vernacular without overcommitting to it: whitewashed walls, vintage marine objects, linens that are worn enough to be comfortable. The terrace faces the Bassin; from it you can watch the oyster boats working the morning and the tidal current running under the pontoons. The restaurant is a draw independent of the accommodation — local oysters, Médoc wine, the grilled fish that the Bassin produces — and has been reviewed favorably in the Paris food press consistently enough to constitute a reliable recommendation.
The surf at Cap Ferret is on the Atlantic side, a fifteen-minute bicycle ride from the village. The Plage de l'Océan is a long, exposed beach break that can be excellent in the right September or October swell — long-period northwest groundswell generates walls that run for a hundred meters at the better sandbars. It is not a surf destination in the sense that Hossegor is; it is a landscape where surfing is incidental to the experience, which is the experience. The guests at La Maison du Bassin are not primarily surfers; they are the Paris architecture-and-food contingent for whom the wave is an optional morning activity. This is fine. The property makes no claims it cannot deliver, and what it delivers — a considered, quiet, genuinely French small hotel in one of the most architecturally serious summer-residence communities in Europe — is specific enough to be worth the trip.
Visit La Maison du BassinA second Cap Ferret property worth noting: Côté Sable, a smaller independent operating near the Plage de l'Océan, represents the more surf-proximate option on the peninsula. Verify current operation before booking; Cap Ferret's independent hospitality layer has seen ownership changes in recent years. The peninsula's specific constraint — access is by ferry from Arcachon (twenty minutes) or by the single road through the Médoc pines, which produces summer gridlock that can turn a thirty-kilometer drive into two hours — structures the guest experience in ways that a booking confirmation does not convey. Come by ferry. Leave the car in Arcachon. The Cap Ferret that matters is walkable and cyclable from the village center.
On the Basque country and its specificity
The Pays Basque sits at the foot of the Pyrenées where the mountains meet the Atlantic, and it has spent most of recorded history insisting that it is not France. The language — Euskara, with no documented relation to any Indo-European language family, older than the Roman conquest, still spoken by roughly 700,000 people across the French and Spanish sides of the border — is the clearest marker of this insistence. The ikurriña, the Basque flag, flies alongside the tricolore in Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz in ways that do not occur in most French coastal towns. The architecture is specifically Basque, not specifically French. The food — pintxos bars in the port neighborhoods, the txakoli wine from the Spanish side, the idiazabal cheese and the dried peppers of Espelette — is a separate culinary tradition from the Bordeaux and Périgord gastronomy that dominates the Landes to the north.
This specificity does not export. The design of the villa basque — the red or green half-timbering, the deep eaves, the specific roof geometry — makes a hotel in Biarritz legible to a visitor in a way that a generic coastal modernism would not. It tells you where you are. But the cultural weight behind the architecture, the language that is spoken in the market and the bar, the political identity that the architecture encodes — this requires time and proximity that a four-night surf trip does not supply. It is worth naming as the thing that makes the Pays Basque section of this coast interesting beyond the wave quality. France's boutique surf scene is not the most technically demanding surf coast in Europe (that argument runs through the Canary Islands and Portugal's west coast). But it is the most culturally specific, and the Basque specificity is the reason.
Why the scene stays small — and the properties to watch
The Loi Littoral is the proximate cause of the boutique tier's small scale, but it is not the only cause. The surf-camp model was so well-established by the mid-1980s — cheap houses in the Landes pines, communal dining, shared vans to the beach, week-long packages that turned a large agricultural property into a profitable hospitality operation — that it absorbed the demand that would otherwise have driven boutique development. The camps are good, some of them excellent, and they run at price points that make a forty-room boutique hotel's economics look difficult. The holiday-rental market in the Landes, saturated with high-quality private houses available by the week, has the same effect. The guest who might otherwise book a boutique hotel in Hossegor is renting a three-bedroom villa with a private pool in the pines and paying less per night per person. The boutique tier is competing not with other boutique tiers but with a rental market of genuine quality.
The properties to watch for the next edition of this collection:
New development in the Guéthary-Saint-Jean-de-Luz corridor. This stretch of Basque coast south of Biarritz, between the Parlementia outer reef and the Spanish border, has the most serious wave access on the French Atlantic — Parlementia, Lafitenia, the reef breaks around Hendaye — and the least developed boutique accommodation layer. The village of Guéthary, perched above a small harbor, has been attracting independent renovation projects. A genuinely design-serious small hotel in Guéthary, positioned for outer-reef access via the fishing harbor boats, would fill a gap that is currently served only by rental villas. It does not exist at the time of this writing, or at least not at the standard that would clear this collection's bar.
The Hossegor lakefront. The Belle Époque lakefront villas on the Lac d'Hossegor — the ones the Hossegor Club built in the 1920s as a speculative neo-regionalist resort community — have been changing hands as estates and being converted at varying levels of investment. Most conversions have produced either private family homes or undistinguished gîtes. A small number are now in development as boutique accommodation. We are watching three properties without being able to profile any of them as complete and operational.
The northern Landes independents. Between Mimizan and Lacanau, several small independent properties have opened or are opening that represent the next wave of Landes boutique development: smaller than camps, more considered than gîtes, priced for the design-aware European surf traveler who wants the pine-forest experience without the group dynamics of a camp. The category is emerging. The editorial bar will be applied when the properties are stabilized.
France's Atlantic southwest will not produce twenty boutique surf hotels. The coast does not work that way. What it will continue to produce — slowly, within the regulatory constraints, one renovation or new build at a time — are the few properties that meet the bar the Landes landscape sets: serious architecture, genuine surf access, a hospitality sensibility that is French rather than aspirationally international. Les Hortensias du Lac and Les Échasses are already doing it. The next one will take the same amount of time to get right, and it will be worth the wait.