Hotel Belles Rives

Hotel Belles Rives

On the waterfront at Juan-les-Pins, on the eastern edge of Cap d'Antibes and roughly ten kilometres from Cannes, the Villa Saint-Louis was where F. Scott Fitzgerald, newly flush from The Great Gatsby, settled with Zelda in 1925 and wrote the early pages of Tender is the Night, staying until 1926 in a haze of jazz, sun, and the particular social intensity of the Lost Generation on holiday. In 1929, Boma Estène and his wife Simone acquired the villa and transformed it into a hotel, which opened in 1930 as Hôtel Belles Rives. The Estène-Chauvin family have run it ever since, now into their fourth generation, with Antoine Estène-Chauvin serving as Group President, overseeing both Belles Rives and the sister property Hôtel Juana, four minutes' walk away. The hotel offers 43 accommodations including 5 suites, all with private balconies, most with direct sea views over the bay toward the Lérins Islands and the hazy outline of the Esterel mountains beyond. In the lobby and La Passagère, interior designer Olivier Antoine updated the 1930s décor with marble and patterned terrazzo, wrought iron and chrome, Ruhlmann chairs, cubist murals and architectural ceramics. Chrome chandeliers, kaleidoscopic mirrors and works by artist Erick Ifergan complete the dining room, which opens onto a terrace over the water, where chef Aurélien Véquaud, originally from the Vendée, cooks a one-Michelin-star menu that leans into the Mediterranean without entirely abandoning his Atlantic instincts, with pastry chef Steve Moracchini, named Pastry Chef of the Year by Gault & Millau in 2016, handling desserts. The Fitzgerald Bar, a member of Europe's Historic and Heritage Cafés, preserves its 1930s Art Deco detail with original oak floors and black marble counters, and hosts the annual Fitzgerald Literary Prize, judged by a jury that has included Frédéric Beigbeder and Hélène Fillières. The private beach below the hotel has a separate seasonal restaurant, a water-ski club (Juan-les-Pins is among the places that claims to have launched the sport), a pontoon for morning yoga, and a Valmont beauty corner for treatments. What Belles Rives offers is a particular kind of European grand hotel experience that is difficult to replicate: small enough (43 rooms) to feel personal, weighty enough in history and physical beauty to justify the reverence people arrive with. The setting does extraordinary things to mood. The quality of light on that bay in the late afternoon, with the terrace canopies casting their blue-and-white stripes across the stone, is not a backdrop you have to work to appreciate. The Fitzgerald association is handled with some intelligence, the bar named rather than themed, the literary prize giving the nostalgia an annual pulse of genuine cultural substance. The rooms themselves are comfortable and well-considered, though this is not a hotel that competes on the terms of, say, a freshly built six-star property with rain showers the size of small rooms. The experience is historical, material, and deeply French Riviera in its proportions. You should not come if you need a large spa, a rooftop pool, or interiors with the kind of considered editorial restraint you might expect from a small contemporary design hotel. The rooms are classical, the corridors narrow, and the hotel fills in July and August with the particular energy of the Côte d'Azur in high season, which is not always calm. You should come if you want to eat very well on a terrace over the Mediterranean, spend mornings on a private beach that has been managed by the same family for nearly a century, and understand, physically and specifically, what it is that writers like Fitzgerald found so undoing about this particular coast. The short version: A 43-room Art Deco hotel on the waterfront at Juan-les-Pins, opened in 1930 on the site of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Riviera villa, run by the Estène-Chauvin family across four generations, with one Michelin star and a private beach.