La Reserve de Beaulieu and Spa

La Reserve de Beaulieu and Spa

Beaulieu-sur-Mer sits in a sheltered bay between Nice and Monaco, protected by a headland that keeps it a few degrees warmer than the rest of the coast and considerably quieter than either of its famous neighbours. It is the kind of place that people who know the Riviera well tend to end up, once the novelty of the bigger names has worn off. La Réserve has been here since 1880, when a local restaurateur dug a tank into the rocks to keep the fishermen's catch fresh and built a restaurant around it. Rooms followed in 1905, the pink Florentine villa came later, and by the middle of the century the guest book included Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Edith Piaf, and Clark Gable, none of whom were particularly interested in being seen, which tells you something about what this place has always been for. The hotel has been owned by the same family, the Delions, since 1997, and it shows in the way it runs, quietly attentive, without any of the corporate machinery that tends to flatten personality out of hotels of this calibre. The 39 rooms and suites feel genuinely residential, most looking directly over the Mediterranean, the black and white photographs of famous former guests lining the walls from lobby to corridor, fresh orchids everywhere. The sherbet orange parasols on the sun deck and the heated seawater pool have become something of a visual signature. The Michelin-starred Restaurant des Rois is one of the better places to have dinner on the whole coast, and La Table de la Réserve handles everything more casual. Monégasques, notably, come here to escape Monaco, which is the kind of endorsement that is hard to manufacture. The hotel opens late March and closes in October, which means the season here has a natural shape to it, and the guests who understand that tend to book early and return every year. The short version: Thirty-nine rooms in a Belle Époque villa directly on the water between Nice and Monaco, family-owned, Michelin-starred, and with a loyal following that has very little interest in being anywhere else.