There are hotels you remember because the room was beautiful, the breakfast was excellent or the view was worth opening the curtains for. And then there are hotels that somehow become part of the journey itself.
Le Negresco Nice is one of those hotels for me.
I first fell for it years ago, long before I ever stayed there. I had gone for a cocktail at the hotel bar and walked through the lobby into the Salon Royal, beneath its extraordinary glass dome. It felt less like entering a hotel and more like accidentally walking onto a film set – except that everything was real.
From that moment on, I wanted to come back. Properly.
A grand hotel that doesn’t behave itself
Le Negresco opened on the Promenade des Anglais in 1913 and has all the ingredients you would expect from one of Europe’s legendary grand hotels: Belle Époque architecture, chandeliers, columns, antique furniture and a famous pink dome.
But restraint has never really been part of its vocabulary.
There is a huge, exuberant Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture, period furniture, contemporary art, sumptuous carpets, flashes of turquoise and red, and rooms that seem to have been assembled according to one simple principle: if it makes you smile, find a place for it.
No two parts of the hotel feel quite the same. And that is largely thanks to one woman.
Madame Augier’s hotel
Jeanne Augier’s family acquired Le Negresco in 1957, and she went on to spend decades turning it into something far more personal than a conventional luxury hotel. She collected art and furniture with enormous enthusiasm, mixed periods and styles without worrying too much about conventional ideas of good taste, and lived in the hotel herself.
The result is gloriously eccentric.
Today, thousands of works of art and pieces of furniture are spread throughout the building. You can walk past Louis XIV one minute and Niki de Saint Phalle the next. Some corridors feel like a museum; others resemble the rather fabulous home of someone who has spent a lifetime buying exactly what she liked.
That, to me, is its charm.
When I eventually stayed at Le Negresco, I never had the feeling that I was simply occupying a very expensive hotel room. It still felt as though I were a guest in Madame Augier’s extraordinary private world.
Luxury needs a personality
I love beautiful hotels. But polished marble, perfect service and a five-star rating are not enough to make me remember one.
The hotels I love most have a point of view.
Le Negresco certainly has one. It can be extravagant, occasionally surreal and probably far too much for anyone whose idea of luxury is fifty shades of beige. Yet despite all that grandeur, I found it surprisingly warm. The staff were friendly rather than intimidating, and looking at the art was treated as something to enjoy, not something to admire reverently from a distance.
That combination is rarer than it should be.
Is Le Negresco worth the trip?
I wouldn’t choose Le Negresco because I simply needed somewhere to sleep in Nice. There are plenty of places that can do that for considerably less money.
I would choose it because sometimes the hotel is part of what you have travelled for.
You go for the glass dome and the art, for a room that doesn’t look like every other luxury hotel room, for the slightly mad details and for the pleasure of staying somewhere that could only exist in this particular place.
Years after my stay, I can still picture its corridors, its colours and the Salon Royal.
And that is perhaps my favourite definition of a hotel worth travelling for: long after you’ve forgotten the thread count, you still remember exactly how it made you feel.
For further information:
visit the official Le Negresco website.
