Byblos

Byblos

On the Avenue Paul Signac, a few minutes’ walk from both the Vieux Port and the Place des Lices and roughly 90 minutes by road from Nice airport (longer in August), the Byblos opened on 27 May 1967 with three days of parties and two godmothers, Brigitte Bardot and Mireille Darc. It was the project of Jean-Prosper Gay-Para, a Lebanese businessman who, the story goes, built it to win Bardot, and who lasted barely a season before the Six-Day War called him back to Beirut. On 19 September that same year it was bought by Sylvain Floirat, the industrialist behind Matra and Europe 1, and his grandson Sylvain Chevanne doubled it in 1983 to almost 17,000 square metres. It has been laid out ever since as a hamlet of ochre and pink houses, stairways, fountains and courtyards around a central pool, with 86 rooms, 47 of them suites, folded in so that few doors are visible from any one courtyard. It has never left the family, and is now run by Floirat’s great-grandson Antoine Chevanne, who managed the hotel from 2001 before taking over the group, renamed Floirat Signatures in 2025, and who is steering it toward its sixtieth season in 2027. The interiors have always been a collage, Provençal terracotta and antique furniture alongside bold 1970s colour, and the current renovation leans into that instead of tidying it away. Laura Gonzalez redesigned four suites in 2024 and eight more for 2026, three of them duplexes, each in its own colour scheme, the last in Mediterranean blues. They come with minibars clad in ceramic tiles from Vallauris, marquetry doors and patinated wood, while the designer Wanda Jelmini has reworked four rooms alongside them. The Byblos Spa by Sisley was fully renovated in 2023, and one of its treatment rooms, the Salon Libanais, occupies the space where Mick and Bianca Jagger celebrated their 1971 wedding. A 100-square-metre gym with Technogym equipment designed by Antonio Citterio arrived this year. Executive chef Nicola Canuti opened Il Giardino, the B. Lounge and the rooftop Sky Bar in 2025, and grows tagetes, verbena and spearmint in the hotel’s kitchen garden for a house infusion. Down at Byblos Beach in Ramatuelle, a new chef, Allan Gonthier, cooks light Mediterranean food. Beneath all of it, as it has been since July 1967, is Les Caves du Roy. Staying here feels less like checking into a hotel than being admitted to a village with its own social calendar. Mornings are slow and private in the courtyards. Lunch at the pool is a dressed-up affair. The evening tilts steadily toward the club downstairs, and the staff run the whole cycle with the ease of people who have seen every version of it. The Gonzalez suites are the best rooms by some distance. The older rooms are comfortable and individually decorated, not the kind of considered restraint you might hope for at these rates, but the Byblos has never pretended to restraint, and its appeal is the full package: walking out of the gate into town, eating somewhere in the old port, and coming home to a party you don’t have to travel to. It suits couples and groups of friends who want Saint-Tropez itself, on foot, more than the version you see from a sunlounger on Pampelonne. You should not come if you want the sea outside your window, since this is a town hotel and the beach is a drive away in Ramatuelle. Nor should you come if you need silence at two in the morning in July, or if a pool where people dress for lunch makes you tired. The hotel is seasonal too, open from late April to early October, so there is no quiet winter version to fall back on. You should come for the Saint-Tropez this hotel helped create, walkable, social and late, kept going by a family that has owned it for nearly sixty years and still adjusts it, carefully, every spring. The short version: A family-owned hotel of 86 rooms and suites in the centre of Saint-Tropez, opened in 1967 and built as a Provençal village around a pool, with Les Caves du Roy nightclub beneath it and twelve suites by Laura Gonzalez.