Best hotels in French Riviera

Cannes and Nice sit 20 minutes off in either direction, yet from the tip of Cap d'Antibes, both disappear entirely, swallowed by nine hectares of pine forest and a coastline straight off the front of a postcard. And that’s the best bit of Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc: total seclusion, right in the middle of the busiest stretch of the Riviera. The cliffside pool, cut straight into the rock, comes with a trapeze slung above the water, where Picasso, Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds once filled its cabanas, inventing the Riviera season as we know it. Three MICHELIN Keys, one of only a handful of hotels anywhere holding them, confirm what regulars already know… Nowhere else on this coast does it quite like Eden Roc.

Rosé-pink walls, umbrella pines and a private beach on the Plage de la Bouillabaisse, a ten-minute stroll from the old port. Small, calm and pointedly unfussy, this is the St-Tropez the magazines tend to skip: no DJ, no velvet rope, no one checking your labels. Arnaud Donckele runs the kitchen at La Vague d'Or, holds three Michelin stars and is a saucier before he's anything else (you'll understand at dinner). The original Capron ceramics survived the LVMH makeover, which tells you the tone. The village is ten minutes on foot. The pontoon is thirty seconds. We know which we'd choose.

The Riviera has plenty of grand hotels, but only one where the concierge can namedrop Grace Kelly's iconic kiss scene before the bellhop's finished with your bags. Opened in 1911 and still fronted by its two famous domes, the Carlton Cannes has changed a little since then, thanks to 750 French artisans who rebuilt it from the inside out. Behind the façade, they also added the one thing it had gone a century without: a Mediterranean garden and a pool you can swim lengths in. And La Croisette's shops, casino and film-festival red carpet are all just a stroll away.

In the hills above the pretty village of Vence, amid the warm cypress and cicada song drifting on the breeze, Château Saint-Martin & Spa claims the best patch of hillside. Once a site guarded by Roman sentries and then fortified by the Knights Templar, a stretch of old wall, a chapel and part of the drawbridge still stand in the gardens today. Today, the hotel is lighter and brighter but still undeniably French (undeniably Provençal, in fact) and the chateau-style building is one-of-a-kind. Surrounded by acres of natural beauty, it's a wonderful place to just be for a few days, Cannes one way, Nice the other, and olive groves tumbling down in between.

This Art Deco hotel is built directly on the shore in Juan-les-Pins, at the foot of Cap d'Antibes, and bills itself as the first on the Riviera with its feet in the water. Nice airport is 20–30 minutes away by car and the restaurants of Juan-les-Pins a ten-minute walk, so it suits a two-night stopover as well as a week by the sea. Inside, the 1930s glamour has been restored rather than replaced, with chrome chandeliers, period murals and a mosaic floor. F. Scott Fitzgerald started Tender Is the Night here when it was still a private villa. Come for the setting, and save your evenings for the bar.

Between Cannes and St Tropez, the corniche twists along the Esterel mountain range, where red volcanic rock drops straight into crystal clear water and the Île d'Or sits offshore. There's also an exceedingly lovely fishing village, Saint-Raphaël, and an even lovelier hotel: Les Roches Rouges. Taking its name from the red stone, it's a low modernist building of whitewash and polished concrete, marigold and ochre. Two swimming pools look onto the bay, one of them seawater and hewn out of the rocks at the water's edge. Kayaks and paddleboards are free to borrow, and a barefoot dinner for two on the pontoon can be arranged. This is where the Côte d'Azur drops its gloss and it's rather wonderful.