The Best Places to Drink and Stay in France

Perched at the top of Vieux Lyon where a 17th-century convent used to keep a low profile, this Italianate hotel has the kind of terrace views over the city's Renaissance rooftops that make you feel you've earned them simply by checking in. Rooms in both the older buildings lean into the monastic origins with a calm, wood-paneled minimalism. The hotel holds a Michelin Key, and it runs two restaurants for when Lyon's famously serious culinary life demands your full attention.

The zinc-topped Bar Guingette, a food hall with communal seating, and a live performance space make this boutique hotel near the Palais Garnier feel more like a small neighborhood than a place to sleep. Rooms run compact, as Paris demands, but come with parquet floors and enough color to wake you up before the coffee does. A few look straight onto the opera house, and three private baths serve as a couples' mini-spa.

Twelve rooms over one corner of the Place des Vosges, Paris's oldest planned square, is a very confident statement from a small hotel. Evok's signature move, blending 17th-century grandeur with 1970s modernism, plays well here: stainless steel against black marble, a palette that reads contemporary rather than stuffy. Some suites have kitchenettes, Roman baths stand in for a full spa, and the Tea Room handles the light-bite-and-drink duties.

The concept here is "Bed & Beverage," which tells you nearly everything: cocktail experts and designer Dorothée Meilichzon teamed up to build a 37-room bohemian hotel in SoPi where the bar is really the point and the rooms are just the bar with a mattress in them. Pre-made cocktails wait in the minibar, and the full bar menu comes via room service. The Michelin Guide selected it, and the vibe is pure South Pigalle, not palace hotel.

A stretching bar in every room tells you where this boutique hotel's priorities lie. On rue des Martyrs in the 9th, HOY (House of Yoga) was built around the twin obsessions of its founder: hospitality and yoga. Rooms run to neutral tones and organic materials, the water is charcoal-filtered, and the wellness center ventures into energy work and holistic gynecology, if that's where your afternoon takes you. The in-house restaurant leans plant-based and Latin American.

Stone facade, quaint balconies, a few with Eiffel Tower sightlines: the bones of this Saint-Germain-des-Prés hotel have been in the neighborhood forever, and a recent relaunch as Miiro's flagship kept them intact. Rooms are styled like a Parisian apartment, pale wood floors, antique lamps, and Le Labo in the bathroom. A speakeasy bar sits just around the corner, and a Refresh Room lets you clean up before check-in or after checkout, which is the kind of idea that makes you wonder why it took this long.

A hilltop above Vence where a Knights Templar commandery slowly became a château hotel, still relatively small in scale despite a modern wing and scattered villas. Colors run soft and Provençal throughout, but the real design move is the windows: the views seem to take in the whole of the Côte d'Azur. There's a La Prairie spa, a private beach club on Cap d'Antibes, and a summer restaurant set inside an olive grove. Holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.

Teddy bears on the beds is a design choice that either wins you over immediately or tells you this isn't your hotel. Maison Soclo is a boutique stay in an 18th-century townhouse just west of the Capitole, where the rooms lean into a French idea of British coziness: homespun textures, unfussy surfaces, and an orderly calm. The garden pool and Gaspard's Bar, open late for cocktails, handle the evening. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Tucked between two storied concert halls on Boulevard Rochechouart, this design hotel keeps things calm while Montmartre does the opposite outside. Rooms run spacious and neutral, some with rooftop views, and the eucalyptus wood furnishings give the place a quiet, considered feel without trying too hard. A guest-only coffee bar and screening room mean you can ignore the neighborhood entirely, though that would rather miss the point.

The antique elevator and grand marble staircase are original; the ivory, terracotta, and olive color palette is very much not. This Pigalle hotel, part of the Orso collection and reimagined by Festen studio, sits on the old boulevard with an Art Deco façade and garret rooms on the top floors angled toward the Sacré Cœur. There's a street-level brasserie packed with locals, a speakeasy below ground, and an open-air rooftop bar above it all.

A floral arrangement now marks the spot where a hospital altar once stood, beneath a dome that used to look over a maternity ward. This luxury hotel along the Rhône occupies two heritage buildings that delivered babies until 2000, now reimagined by Parisian designer Jean-Philippe Nuel in a style best described as contemporary-luxe meeting 18th-century grandeur. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. Lyon being Lyon, the restaurants are serious business too.

Perched on Fourvière Hill above the Saône, this luxury hotel was designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, decorated by Jacques Grange, and landscaped by Louis Benech, which tells you immediately what register you're in. Rooms run between Carrara marble bathrooms and sweeping rooftop panoramas. The spa leans into its Roman hill setting with columns and bath-house atmosphere. The lounge bar pours wines from a nearby 17th-century chateau. It holds a Michelin Key.

Philippe Starck designed the interiors, which tells you something about who this wellness resort near Saint-Tropez is for, and what they expect to spend. Twenty minutes from the circus of the port, Lily of the Valley sits on a hillside above Gigaro Beach with a spa, a 25-meter outdoor pool, and a restaurant angled toward the bay. The menu leans heavily vegetarian and vegan, which fits the self-improvement brief. The Michelin Guide awarded it 2 Keys.

A lovingly restored country estate outside Montpellier, spread across 120-odd acres of meadows, vineyards, and old-growth trees that take the concept of a garden quite seriously. The Michelin Guide awarded it 2 Keys. Rooms differ wildly, from Belle Époque reds and lavenders to grayscale rooms furnished with accordion lamps, which is a choice. Freestanding tubs, hidden doors, and private terraces appear throughout, and the on-site restaurant leans hard into Slow Food principles.

A vintage Citroën Acadiane converted into an espresso bar in the lobby tells you pretty much everything about this hotel's personality. The 25hours Terminus Nord is a design-forward hotel right across from the Gare du Nord, with rooms sized Small through Extra Large and interiors that lean into African and Asian aesthetics rather than anything vaguely Haussmann. The pan-Asian restaurant and the Sape Bar keep the social spaces lively, and a loaner bike waits if you want to explore the 10th.

The vintage cocktail bar still has its curving booths and a retro Wurlitzer, and the wood-paneled reception desk still has its original rows of key hooks. This Montmartre boutique hotel leans hard into the neighborhood's bohemian mythology, with flea-market finds, musical instruments, and a rotary phone mounted beside every bed. Rooms wrap around an interior garden, and the upper ones have rooftop terraces. Breakfast goes in the garden, naturally.

A former presbytery in a village that looks purpose-built for Instagram, on the road to Mont Saint Michel, with a cottage garden that doubles as the kitchen's larder. The Michelin-starred chef runs a single surprise menu, vegetable-forward and sea-leaning, plated with a restraint that suits the old stone walls. A handful of stylish guestrooms make the detour easy to justify to yourself. Book ahead; the room holds few.

A restored Luberon estate in Provence, where the stone walls have been around since the 1600s but the hotel itself is new enough that nobody's set anything in stone yet. Vineyards and gardens sprawl across the grounds, the pool is exactly what you came to France to find, and the cellar stocks the estate's own wine alongside what feels like half of Provence. The Michelin Guide awarded it 2 Keys.

The pencil bins at reception are intentionally comical, and the back-to-school conceit runs throughout this boutique hotel in Vieux Lyon. Public spaces lean into worn wood and leather; rooms flip the script with a clean, monochrome minimalism that only loosely evokes student housing. A garden terrace, co-working nooks, and a South American-inflected tapas bar give it a social life the curriculum never offered.

Sandwiched between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est, this boutique hotel is the first hospitality project by English designer Luke Edward Hall, who describes the result as "a little bonkers." That's fair: the palette runs hot, the patterns clash joyfully, and even the basement gym got the full treatment. Rooms are cozy rather than sprawling, but a few have balconies, and none of them let you forget where you are.

An 18th-century townhouse on the quiet west edge of Lille's old town, with modernist furniture and contemporary art pushed up against the period plasterwork in a way that feels considered rather than chaotic. The kitchen leans into inventive, seafood-forward French cooking and draws on the hotel's own gardens. A small, boutique luxury hotel, and a Michelin Key holder, that treats its beautiful bones as a starting point.

Four acres of parkland just below Saint-Paul-de-Vence, with stone farmhouses, olive trees, and 76 rooms dressed in antiques and soft southern colors. The Michelin Guide awarded it 2 Keys. It's an old-school resort that leans hard into the fantasy of the private Provençal estate, marble baths and all, while staying close enough to the Côte d'Azur that a beach day is easy and far enough that the Riviera crowds feel like someone else's problem.

Every one of the 36 rooms comes with a projector, screen, and cinema-quality sound, plus a library of around 10,000 films, because MK2, the French cinema empire behind this hotel, was not going to do hospitality halfway. Rooms run bold colors and modernist furniture, some tight by any measure, some opening onto proper city views. There's also a rooftop bar with its own outdoor screen, a karaoke room, a café, and a private six-seat theater reserved for guests.