Villa René Lalique

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Villa Built by a Legend

The house came first. René Lalique — master jeweller, pioneer of Art Nouveau and Art Deco glassmaking, creator of pieces for Tsar Nicholas II and the British royal family — had his glassworks established in Wingen-sur-Moder in 1922, and built his personal villa there in 1920. When it reopened as a Relais & Châteaux property in 2015, bearing his name, it carried that history intact: the proportions, the craftsmanship, the instinct for beauty in material things. Every room is furnished with Lalique crystal and decorative objects, the tableware in the dining room is Lalique, and the six suites draw their individual character from the brand's iconic collections.

Chef Paul Stradner's Three A's

The restaurant earned 2 Michelin stars just three months after opening in 2016 — a pace that says something about the clarity of vision behind it. Since 2020, that vision belongs to Chef Paul Stradner, who grew up on a farm in Styria, Austria, and came to cooking through an apprenticeship that led him to seven years at the three-Michelin-starred Schwarzwaldstube in the Black Forest, then to L'Arnsbourg in the Moselle alongside Jean-Georges Klein, and eventually to his own 2-star recognition in Baden-Baden. When Klein — his mentor and the Villa's founding chef — invited him to join the brigade in 2017, Stradner accepted without hesitation.

His contemporary French cuisine is organised around what he calls the three A's: Alsace, his adopted homeland and the source of his seasonal produce; Austria, the country that shaped his palate; and Allemagne (Germany), where he built his technical foundation. The result is a cooking style that feels both rooted and personal — familiar enough to reward loyal guests, distinctive enough to draw those seeking something new.

Alongside him, Pastry Chef Jonathan Bunel works with produce from the Northern Vosges region, and Restaurant Manager Hervé Schmitt choreographs the service around Lalique's crystal tableware. The wine cellar, overseen by Alsatian Head Sommelier Romain Iltis, holds no fewer than 60,000 bottles — one of the finest collections in Europe — and earned a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence. Pairing here is not an afterthought.

A Place of Considered Pleasures

The Villa sits at the edge of the Northern Vosges Regional Nature Park, surrounded by forest. Nature was the engine of René Lalique's creative life, and it remains present in every direction — through the windows of the dining room, in the ingredients arriving from local producers, in the quiet that settles over the property away from any city. The establishment is a member of Les Grandes Tables du Monde, a circle reserved for restaurants where gastronomy, setting and service are considered as a whole rather than separately.

What Villa René Lalique offers, in the end, is a particular kind of coherence: a historic building, a craft legacy, a chef with a clear point of view, and a cellar deep enough to match any of it.