The Best Hotels in Cannes

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 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.