Mondrian Cannes

Mondrian Cannes

The building that became the Mondrian Cannes has occupied 45 Boulevard de la Croisette since 1863, when it opened as the first luxury hotel in Cannes, a distinction that the current owners have wisely left unremarked in the lobby but which hangs over the whole property like a slow, warm light. Known for most of the twentieth century as the Grand, it spent decades as the tallest building on the Croisette before Accor's Ennismore group acquired it, closed it for a €20 million renovation in two stages, and reopened it in 2023 as the Mondrian brand's first French address. Across eleven floors, there are 75 rooms and suites, two panoramic rooms, and a Signature Suite on the top floor, all oriented either toward the Bay of Cannes or back over the rooftops of the old town. The hotel is managed under the Mondrian flag, part of Ennismore's expanding lifestyle portfolio, and it holds the distinction, rare for this stretch of boulevard, of being the only hotel on the Croisette with its own gardens, roughly 4,000 square metres of century-old palms and planted terrace that press between the building and the sea. The public spaces were handed to Franco-Brazilian firm Triptyque, whose previous projects include installations at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Pompidou in Paris, and they have worked in wood, marble, leather, and plant fibre throughout the lobby, bar, and restaurant, pulling the outside in without sentimentalising it. The lobby bar sits behind a zinc counter, a Parisian reference that reads as a deliberate tonal correction to the usual Riviera gilding, and the room flows into Mr. Nakamoto, the hotel's restaurant, where executive chef Pierrick Cizeron leads a menu that draws across Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese influences alongside local Provençal produce, with a wine cellar that is considered one of the more serious in Cannes, extending into natural, biodynamic, and organic bottles. The visual programme across the hotel is the work of Mathilde de l'Écotais, a photographer and former international correspondent, who covers the restaurant ceiling, stairwells, and communal areas with large-format nature photography that sits somewhere between documentation and meditation. Guest rooms in the 430-square-foot town-facing category take their palette from the ocean, white and beige with black geometric detailing, Art Deco furniture, and textiles from Marie Bastide, whose wave-patterned carpets do a good deal of the atmospheric work. Sea-facing rooms open through floor-to-ceiling French windows onto private terraces. On the eleventh floor, the Panoramic Room extends to an outdoor terrace with a rooftop hot tub. Adjacent to the hotel and technically separate, Hyde Beach Cannes operates on the sand directly in front, where chef Gabriele Faiella, who trained with Gordon Ramsay, runs an Italian-leaning menu for lunch and into the evening. What the Mondrian Cannes is doing is interesting and, for the Croisette, relatively rare: it is a mid-sized hotel, 75 rooms is small by boulevard standards, that has made a consistent editorial choice about what kind of place it wants to be. The art programme is specific rather than decorative, the food is genuinely cross-cultural rather than lazily fusion, and the garden, which older Cannes regulars still associate with the festival circuit's habit of using the Grand's grounds as a meeting point away from the Palais, gives the property a pace that the larger hotels simply cannot manufacture. The martini cart that rolls through the garden terrace each afternoon until eleven is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that signals someone has thought about the rhythm of a day here. You should not come if you want the full Croisette theatre, the white-gloved grandeur of the Carlton or the Art Deco scale of the Martinez, because the Mondrian is operating at a different register entirely, quieter and more considered, and the branded-lifestyle machinery of Ennismore is occasionally visible in the programming and the social-first framing. You should come if what you want is a historically significant building that has been handled with genuine intelligence, a restaurant serious enough to carry a long dinner without embarrassment, and the only garden on the Croisette to sit in when the boulevard becomes too much. The short version: A 75-room five-star on the Croisette occupying Cannes' original 1863 luxury hotel, renovated in 2023 by Triptyque with an art programme by Mathilde de l'Écotais, a cross-Asian restaurant, and the only private gardens on the boulevard.