The Best Places to Drink and Stay in Nantes

A small French hotel chain that figured out how to make complimentary feel like a personality: the check-in is virtual, the Coco-Mat beds have Italian linen, and every evening the Club hosts an aperitivo hour with wine and antipasti on the house. The sleek, Scandinavian-leaning rooms come with proper workspaces and organic-cotton towels. The gym, sauna, coffee, and fruit around the clock round out what amounts to a quietly generous four-star deal in central Nantes.

A château hotel on the outskirts of Nantes where each room is themed to a different destination, so you might sleep under a tent-style four-poster surrounded by Mongolian wallpaper or wake up to leopard print and red lacquer. The grounds feel genuinely removed from the city, though Nantes is only minutes away. A Cinq Mondes spa hides in the vaulted cellars, and summer brings a poolside bar. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A sleek, minimalist hotel on the cours des 50 Otages, La Pérouse sits close enough to the Cathedral and the Château des ducs de Bretagne that sightseeing becomes almost involuntary. Rooms are spare but quietly comfortable, with good bath products and no visual clutter. Breakfast runs to homemade pastries and organic jams, and the bar stocks a pleasingly eccentric range of spirits, including local whiskey and Thai rum, if that's where the evening goes.

A boutique hotel in central Nantes where each of the 13 rooms takes its decorative cues from a different corner of the world, Tibet to Okinawa, so no two stays feel quite alike. It's the urban outpost of the nearby Château de Maubreuil, and the wine cellar the two share is said to be extravagantly well-stocked. The kind of place that layers genuine comfort under the art-forward concept rather than letting the concept do all the work.

Hand-painted botanical wallpaper climbs the walls of this 60-room boutique hotel directly across from Nantes' main train station, making it hard to miss and harder to forget. The lobby café runs salsa and jazz swing through the speakers while doubling as a coworking spot and occasional artists' residency, which is a lot to ask of one room. Top-floor balconies catch a wide sweep of the city, and the Château des Ducs de Bretagne is a short walk.

One of the suites is a 1930s riverboat docked on the Loire, which tells you everything about the ambition level here. This boutique hotel in Nantes pays homage to Jules Verne with apartment-style suites built around his novels: a bed suspended above the floor in the balloon room, a spaceship bathroom elsewhere, and one room partly made from shipping containers. High ceilings, exposed stone, and wide-plank floors keep it from tipping into theme-park territory.

A boutique hotel built inside a 19th-century chapel, where the lobby sits in the former choir beneath a vaulted ceiling tall enough to make you feel appropriately small. Original stained-glass windows and exposed stone carry over into the rooms, though neon-colored furniture ensures the mood stays this side of a pilgrimage. A sauna, hammam, and ice room round out the wellness center for when the architecture stops being enough.