Hotel Belle Plage Brougham

Hotel Belle Plage Brougham

On the rue Brougham, at the foot of Le Suquet, the old quarter that rises above Cannes in a tangle of ochre and terracotta, a 1930s seaside hotel stood for decades in varying states of faded usefulness before La Clé Group, the Paris-based collection already responsible for Hôtel Bachaumont and Hôtel National des Arts et Métiers, acquired it and spent three years rebuilding it almost entirely from the inside out. The result, which opened in March 2022, is 50 rooms and suites, plus ten private residences including a penthouse, in a building that has been so thoroughly reconceived by designer Raphaël Navot and FAAR architecture studio that its 1930s bones are now more rumour than fact. The undulating white facade, all soft curves and vertical timber shutters, reads from the Square Mistral below like something between Miami Art Deco and a Mediterranean cruise liner that has quietly decided to stay. La Clé Group runs the property, with the gardens and grounds landscaped by Gwenaëlle Grandjean of Les Ateliers Saint-Lazare. Inside, Navot, whose earlier work includes Silencio in Paris and Le 39V, has worked almost exclusively in natural materials: regional stone, white concrete floors set with large chips of marble as terrazzo, oak furniture with spare, considered lines, and woven recycled leather for the headboards, which tilt back to become rugs in a custom detail that sounds gimmicky and works completely. Rooms face either the sea or the Square Mistral's palm canopy, most with balconies. The Belle Plage Suite has a halo-lit living room, a bone-white freestanding bathtub, a fully equipped kitchenette and two sea-facing terraces framing the Esterel range. The food programme is serious: Bella, the rooftop restaurant, is run by Eyal Shani, the Tel Aviv-born chef behind Miznon in Paris and some thirty restaurants from Melbourne to New York, whose approach to Mediterranean cooking involves daily market decisions and a menu rebuilt around whatever arrives that morning from small local producers. The spa, housed in a 19th-century villa across the street with its own gardens, is the largest in Cannes at 800 square metres, and offers hammam, sauna, Watsu pool, and a range of holistic treatments; spa access is included with every room booking. What Belle Plage does, and does better than most of the Riviera's newer openings, is refuse the grammar of the grand hotel entirely. There is no marble atrium, no hushed formality, no ceremony of arrival involving a uniformed procession, and this is deliberate and correct. The scale is residential, the palette is sand and sea and pale mimosa yellow, and the effect on arrival is more like walking into a very well-appointed apartment belonging to someone with an excellent eye than checking into a hotel. It is ten minutes on foot from the Palais des Festivals, which means proximity to the Film Festival without being absorbed by it, and the Le Suquet neighbourhood, with its Tuesday and Saturday morning market on the Forville, keeps the hotel grounded in a version of Cannes that has nothing to do with yachts or red carpets. The rooftop, with its near-360 degree view from the Mediterranean blue to the terracotta rooftops of the old town and the violet mass of the Esterel beyond, is one of the genuinely good places to be at dusk on the Côte d'Azur. You should not come if you want the full Croisette experience, the see-and-be-seen of the big palace hotels, or a traditional pool (there is a Watsu pool in the spa, but the hotel has no outdoor swimming pool of its own). You should also reconsider during Festival fortnight in May, when Cannes changes character entirely and rates reflect that change. You should come if you want a considered, design-forward base in the quieter, older part of Cannes, with genuinely good food on the roof, a spa that justifies the word, and rooms that feel thought through rather than dressed up. The short version: A 50-room renovation of a 1930s Cannes seafront hotel, rebuilt in 2022 by Raphaël Navot for La Clé Group in Le Suquet, with an Eyal Shani rooftop restaurant, the city's largest spa, and a facade that refuses every cliché on the Côte d'Azur.