Juana

Juana

Built in 1931 by Alexandre Barache, a young Russian-born entrepreneur who saw what Juan-les-Pins was becoming, the Juana was designed by Georges Dikansky, the architect also responsible for the Palais Wilson and Le Grand Pavois along the same stretch of the Côte d'Azur, in the purest Art Deco idiom then in fashion on the French Riviera. It stands at 19 Avenue Georges Gallice on the edge of the Pinède Gould, the pine park named for the American billionaire Frank Jay Gould who effectively invented the resort in the 1920s, 260 metres from the beach, the Mediterranean glinting in the middle distance between the stone-pines, the Lérins Islands visible on clear days beyond. A classified historic monument, its façade has never materially changed: the stucco, the wrought-iron balconies, the fluted columns, the round-arched windows. The building's guest list over the decades reads as a complete inventory of the twentieth century's more interestingly reckless: the Aga Khan, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and, from 1960 onward, the backstage address of the Antibes–Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival, where Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Ray Charles all stayed within these 40 rooms and suites. In 2006, Marianne Estène-Chauvin, whose family has owned the sister property Hôtel Belles Rives since 1929, purchased the Juana and folded it into the Belles Rives Group, which is today run by her son, Antoine Chauvin-Estène, who joined the group in 2017. The interiors work hard against the trap of period-piece nostalgia, the Art Deco geometry present but not overdone: bold geometric carpets and patterned artwork, wrought-iron balconies on all rooms except the Classic category, marble bathrooms with deep bathtubs and Asprey toiletries, Serta beds and Kohler baths throughout. The outdoor pool is white marble and entirely correct in the Riviera context. The restaurant, newly named Paseo and redesigned with what the group calls a botanical-chic sensibility, serves French Mediterranean food beneath chandeliers on the terrace under the pines, awarded the Maîtres Restaurateurs label. For more serious eating, guests use their Chauvin-Estène family connection to Belles Rives, a five-minute walk away, where chef Aurélien Véquaud holds one Michelin star at La Passagère and the private beach is available for watersports, boat rentals, and lunches above the sea. The bar at the Juana is small and good, and the buffet breakfast is delivered with the kind of French seriousness the format demands. The Juana is the sort of hotel that has earned its reputation without needing to remind you of it. There is a confidence in the building, in the slow flap of the pine trees, in the knowledge that Miles Davis once sat in this particular bar, that gives it an atmosphere no amount of deliberate positioning could manufacture. It suits people who want to be in Juan-les-Pins rather than simply near it, who are interested in the town's genuinely eccentric mid-century history, in the Jazz Festival in July, in Antibes twenty minutes on foot, in the Picasso Museum and the old town walls. The rooms face either the sea or the pines, both views arresting in different registers, the sea rooms more obviously photogenic, the pine rooms quieter and, some would argue, more evocative of what the place actually was. You should not come if you want a design hotel in the contemporary sense, the kind where the concept precedes the architecture and a creative director's brief is legible in every corner. The Juana's sensibility is historical and familial rather than editorial, and the 40 rooms, with their periodic renovations by a resident cabinetmaker, reflect an owner's taste more than a stylist's. The season runs from April to October, it fills during the Jazz Festival in July, and the garden terrace acquires a DJ on Friday evenings through summer, which is either the best or the worst thing about it depending on your disposition. You should come if the weight of the building's history matters to you, if Art Deco is something you respond to rather than merely tolerate, and if having the Belles Rives beach and La Passagère in your back pocket makes a 40-room monument on the Riviera feel like the exactly right decision. The short version: A 40-room Art Deco historic monument in Juan-les-Pins, built in 1931 by Alexandre Barache and now owned by the Belles Rives Group, with a Michelin-starred sister hotel five minutes away and six decades of Jazz Festival history in its bones.