The Best Hotels in Cannes

The twin domes on the belle époque facade were reportedly modeled on the figure of a famous courtesan, which tells you everything about the Carlton's disposition. This is a grand seafront hotel on La Croisette, polished to a Forbes Five Star finish and freshly restored by hundreds of French artisans. During the film festival it becomes the unofficial industry headquarters; outside those two weeks, the bar still fills with people who travel with staff.

The hotel sits directly across from the Palais des Festivals, meaning a Croisette-facing balcony during film festival season is about as close as most people get to a red carpet without actually being on one. This Art Deco grand hotel holds 2,500 celebrity photographs on its walls and a Murano glass mosaic pool out back. The pomp is structural, not decorative, which is either exactly what you want on the Côte d'Azur or a reason to book elsewhere.

The art deco façade on the Croisette has become so synonymous with Cannes Film Festival that the neon rooftop sign turns up in magazine spreads almost as often as the talent. This grand hotel runs to over 400 rooms, a private beach club, a garden pool, a Carita spa, and the Michelin-starred Palme d'Or restaurant. The interiors were updated by Pierre-Yves Rochon without losing an ounce of the original roaring-twenties register.

Raphael Navot's curves run through all 50 rooms of this Riviera hotel, the natural materials and soft Provençal palette doing a lot to soften what could easily have tipped into showboating. It's a thoroughly modernized Thirties building, all sinuous lines with no hard sci-fi edges, and the views over Mistral Square's treetops toward the sea are the kind that make checkout feel genuinely cruel. The rooftop bar handles apéritifs to nightcaps with mountains behind you.

The rooftop pool looks straight out at the Mediterranean, with yachts in the foreground and the current Palais des Festivals at the far end of La Croisette. This 263-room luxury hotel sits on the Croisette itself, on the site where the original festival hall once stood. The interiors split the difference between 1950s Riviera glamour and assertively modern hotel décor, which works better than it sounds when the backdrop is this particular stretch of coastline.

The rooftop pool deck sits above the noise of the Croisette, which is more or less the point. This boutique hotel in central Cannes runs thirty rooms and fifteen suites, all built around canopy beds and enough in-room technology to keep you occupied on rainy days. The Palais des Festivals is a short walk; the Spa by Phytomer is downstairs. For anyone who finds the grande dame palaces a bit much, this is the smaller, quieter alternative.

A mid-century facade on the quieter end of the Croisette, a short walk from the Palais des Festivals and one private beach club away from having an excuse to skip it. This is a luxury hotel that earns its Riviera credentials not by being eccentric but by being impeccably itself: contemporary-classic interiors, a restrained hand with the gilding, and the kind of tastefulness that Lucien Barrière hotels tend to enforce like a house rule.

Rooms here are compact by design, because the point is really the palm-fringed pool deck, the organic breakfast buffet, and a rotating calendar of cultural events that keeps the common spaces lively. This lifestyle hotel on Cannes's outskirts was renovated using mostly recycled materials, and the rooms come with kitchenettes and vintage mini-fridges sized exactly right for a bottle of local rosé. Larger suites add private terraces and original artwork.