In French, seagulls are often called rieuses (laughers) for their aggressive cackle-esque squawking. I thought of this term upon arriving at the freshly restored Carlton Cannes, as seagulls swooped and perched on the wrought-iron balconies decorating a facade that looks as if it were made of macarons glacés. But these rieuses, the Carlton’s feathered habituées, were uncharacteristically silent: they beheld the promenade de la Croisette and the sparkling blue sea beyond, with the puffy-chested vainglory of kings admiring their domain, as if even they were awed by the sheer splendour of it all.
At the Carlton Beach Club, guests in Eres swimsuits sipped Perrier-Jouët and unpetalled globe artichokes under giant parasols, while clouds, fine as mousseline, idled along skies the shade of Grace Kelly’s chiffon dress in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 thriller “To Catch a Thief.” The film, in fact, was shot here.
And in an impossibly cinematic turn, Kelly returned to holiday at the Carlton in 1955, arranging to meet Prince Rainier III of Monaco in the Grand Salon. (They married the following year.) The Carlton, more palace than hostelry, is the kind of place where movie stars and actual royalty have their meet-cute.
It’s also the kind of place where Elizabeth Taylor vacationed with seven of her husbands, where Brigitte Bardot splashed about the beach club, where Sophia Loren was photographed peering out of her thrown-open windows, and where the League of Nations held its first meeting (then called the Cannes Conference) in January 1922. The Carlton, opened in 1913, is the neoclassical grande dame par excellence.
More than a hundred years of champagne-soaked French Riviera glamour can prove wearying, so the Carlton was recently treated to a five-year restoration, which cost an undisclosed sum and employed more than 750 craftspeople and artisans (including some once commissioned by the Palace of Versailles).
The refurb, courtesy of French interior designer Tristan Auer and architect Richard Lavelle, is a well-columned, light-flooded dream of Golden Age extravagance and Cote d’Azur freshness — all pink Venini chandeliers, potted baby orange trees, painted frescoes and Hollywood lore.
The hotel reopened this spring, in time for the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival and its countless flashbulbs. (The Carlton could well be the single most photographed hotel in the world.) I visited after the festival, but the guests — in their straw boater hats and Breton-striped shirts — all looked as if they had stepped off a French new wave movie set, like extras in, say, a Jacques Tati reboot. Even toddlers wore the sort of white linens that had clearly never met a plate of spaghetti.
Most striking, though, was the light bathing every scene — there is a thinness, a magical clarity to it. It’s absurd, or at least redundant, I realize, to describe the light as luminous, but it’s as if the light itself here had swallowed a flashbulb.
If the Carlton is savouring her comeback, as any true starlet would, so too is the grande dame hotel in general. Pre-pandemic, travellers may have avoided the immodesty or shameless flash of the big-hotel experience, leaning more toward secret coves and hidden coasts. But there is now a renewed appetite for the nostalgia of striped-umbrella leisure, for hotels that are destinations and worlds in and of themselves. Perhaps it’s the “White Lotus” effect, or a post-lockdown greed for colour and spectacle — as if we’re all over subtlety of any, well, (umbrella) stripe.
In other fancy pockets of the world: The Grand Hotel Tremezzo, a Belle Époque masterpiece lounging on the shores of Lake Como, has just emerged from an extravagant redo, while New York’s Waldorf Astoria is currently enjoying a billion-dollar renovation. London’s 1930s landmark, the Dorchester, reopened this year after an epic revamp, and Capri, Italy’s more than 200-year-old Hotel La Palma, a study in handkerchief-in-the-hair dolce vita summering, is also fresh from a renovation.
One afternoon, I wandered through the coiling cobbled streetlets of Le Suquet, Cannes’ medieval neighbourhood, and I passed a woman, in linen and espadrilles, sitting at a café on a cane-backed chair, reading a book in the middle of the day: “Se Perdre” (Getting Lost) by Nobel Prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux.
We so often travel to get lost, for the luxury of self-forgetting, maybe for the particular thrill of finding ourselves anew. But there is also, I thought as I returned to the Carlton, looking at its domes reaching toward the sort of limpid skies that must have sent Raoul Dufy to his watercolours, a thrill, or at least a comfort, in knowing exactly where you are.
Olivia Stren stayed as a guest of the Carlton Cannes, a Regent Hotel, which did not review or approve this article.
