Quercus Becomes Georgia's Only Relais & Châteaux Property

Southern hospitality was just reinforced with a major accolade.

Quercus, a four-key regenerative ranch and restaurant in Gay, Georgia, joined Relais & Châteaux on Monday — making it the only hotel and restaurant in the state to hold membership in the prestigious international association.

Set on 4,000 acres along the Flint River in Georgia’s Hidden Foothills, roughly one hour from Atlanta, Quercus combines luxury accommodations with a regenerative farming philosophy and a zero-mile, zero-waste culinary program. Nightly rates start at $2,700, all-inclusive.

The property is the result of an unlikely but inspired partnership: Landowner Chiara Visconti di Modrone and her husband Angelos Pervanas joined forces in 2020 with Atlanta restaurateurs Chef Ryan Smith and Kara Hidinger, the duo behind celebrated Staplehouse. Quercus debuted in fall 2024, rolled out enhanced amenities in September 2025, and has four additional guest rooms coming in late 2026.

The accommodations themselves lean hard into restoration. Each of the four standalone cabins comes with a private patio, fireplace, outdoor cold plunge, sauna, and red light therapy system — all designed to sync with guests’ circadian rhythms amid a landscape of forests, lakes, creeks, and working farmland.

At Uberto, the property’s signature restaurant, Chef Smith and Hidinger run a menu-less tasting experience that sources roughly 90 percent of its ingredients directly from the ranch’s biodynamic gardens. A fermentation lab at the heart of the kitchen drives the kitchen’s approach to preservation, digestion, and flavors specific to this particular place.

Farm-to-table cuisine and farm-to-restful sleep? We’re so in.

“Relais & Châteaux celebrates places where cuisine and culture emerge from the land itself,” Chef Smith said in prepared remarks. “That ethos mirrors everything we are building at Quercus — a place where conservation, agriculture, and hospitality form one living system, and where guests become part of our extended family.”

The estate’s roots run deep. The original property was founded by Visconti di Modrone’s father, the late Duke of Milan, who settled in Gay, Georgia in the 1970s. The working ranch evolved into a hunting lodge frequented by European nobility through the 1980s and 1990s before its current transformation into one of the South’s most distinctive luxury escapes.

With its Relais & Châteaux membership now official, Quercus joins a global network of independently owned properties united by a commitment to local heritage, culinary excellence, and biodiversity conservation — and puts a small Georgia town on the luxury travel map.