Marsanne · Hospitality
On the village square in Marsanne, Pantoufle is the house Jeanne Jouvet imagined — a place where conviviality and generosity restore the pleasure of taking one’s time. Music entered the picture early, while the project was still taking shape. Two years on, it continues to evolve with the seasons, Jeanne’s ideas and the life of the place.
The brand
Hospitality, Jeanne’s way
On Marsanne’s village square, Pantoufle has seventeen rooms. No numbers: shoe sizes. And an invitation almost contained in a verb: pantoufler.
Jeanne calls it a pied-à-terre. You come for lunch, to sleep, to meet friends, wander through the village, have a drink, let a conversation run on. The rooms have their sizes, the team its pantouflards, and idleness needs no excuse.
The table, the bar, the bedrooms, the pool and the garden all belong to one house, deeply rooted in Marsanne and open to those who come to stay.
When Pascale and Éric first see Pantoufle, they immediately recognise Jeanne in it. Her infectious good humour and sunny personality are already everywhere. So are her wit, her taste for the unexpected and her eye for detail.
Music will have to find that freedom of tone.
© Pantoufle / Pierrick Verny
The project
The urge to pantoufler
Jeanne had met Pascale and Éric a few years earlier, during her final year at Institut Paul Bocuse. They were her lecturers. Through their classes, she had discovered Music Eye View, the projects they were working on in hospitality and the way they approached music within a place.
After graduating, Jeanne decides to open a place of her own: Pantoufle. As the project begins to take shape, music enters her thinking early and she comes back to Pascale and Éric. They, in turn, suggest bringing Pantoufle into the Institute as a final-year project for a new group of students. The place Jeanne is imagining becomes a real brief for a new cohort, while symbolically closing the circle that had begun with her a few years before.
Through their conversations, her approach to hospitality, her place within the village, the time she wants to give those who come to stay — and the musicality that will accompany the place — all begin to come into focus.
Pantoufler in the Drôme Provençale, with music woven into the place.
Sound identity
Off the beaten track
For Pascale, the starting point is still Jeanne: her wit, her sunny energy, her instinct for simple hospitality and her very deliberate pleasure in taking her time.
From there comes a natural desire to explore a particular France through music.
In the South of the 1960s and 70s, that France also meets a counterculture drawn to different rhythms of life — freer, more bohemian, closer to the land. Without becoming décor or retro quotation, that diffuse memory resonates with Pantoufle: sunshine, nonchalance, irony, a desire to escape.
Éric and his team begin looking beyond the big names for overlooked tracks; behind a familiar voice, for the forgotten song; within a repertoire we think we know, for paths collective listening has gradually left behind.
From there, the field stretches from the 1960s to today’s French scenes.
Artists we think we know reappear through songs left off the usual paths. Forgotten gems feel unexpectedly contemporary again. Other songs remain unknown yet carry that strange familiarity that makes you want to know them.
At Pantoufle, that is often where the pleasure lies: recognising a presence before being able to name it.
At Pantoufle, these moments belong fully to the spirit of the place: the pleasure of sharing. Familiar voices, hidden or forgotten gems, rarely heard French songs, then younger artists who carry that same freedom somewhere new.
A phone comes out of a bag.
The track gets Shazamed!
© Pantoufle / Pierrick Verny
Programming
Music, from morning to night
The day allows this French musical landscape to change character.
At breakfast
France wakes gently: intimate voices, songs full of poetry, lightness and sunshine.
At lunch
Éric and his team dig deeper into the 1960s and 70s: gems, hidden or forgotten treasures, sunlit or mischievous songs that tell another story of French music.
In the evening
The selection opens out to newer French scenes, between chanson and contemporary pop, always in French.
The same musical territory shifts from hour to hour, from place to place, without losing its accent.
Governance
Back to Pantoufle!
Two years after the first conversations around Pantoufle, Pascale and Éric keep coming back to Marsanne.
Sometimes a new season, a playlist or one of Jeanne’s ideas calls them back.
Sometimes they simply come to stay at Pantoufle, take a room, sit down at the table, see Jeanne again and spend a few days in the house because they like being there.
Those stays matter precisely because they do not always need a reason beyond the pleasure of being there.
Pantoufle is no longer only a house they helped put to music. It has also become a place Pascale and Éric simply enjoy returning to.
“Pascale & Éric come to see me often, and the best playlists always seem to grow out of those relaxed moments we share.”
Jeanne Jouvet (Owner, Pantoufle)
And that is often where the most interesting ideas surface.
A song mentioned over dinner. Something Jeanne wants to try. A season approaching. A theme that comes up in conversation and gets picked up again a few days later.
After two years, some reference points no longer need to be discussed. It becomes quicker to recognise what belongs to Pantoufle, what can surprise it just enough and what, however good, would sound better somewhere else.
Jeanne keeps evolving Pantoufle. The repertoire broadens. New songs enter; others disappear. Pascale and Éric return, listen, suggest and keep searching with her.