Le Negresco

The Hotel

Le Negresco opened on the Promenade des Anglais in January 1913, the project of a Romanian-born hotelier, Henri Negresco, who hired Edouard-Jean Niermans (the great architect of late Belle Epoque café society) to deliver a palace that would outshine every other address on the Baie des Anges. The pink dome, lifted from a study Niermans made of the Duchess of Uzes' breasts (the story is part of the property's official folklore), was completed in months. The First World War broke out the following year, the hotel was converted into a military hospital, and Henri Negresco died nearly bankrupt in 1920. The building survived, passed hands twice, and in 1957 came into the ownership of the Augier family, whose matriarch, Jeanne Augier, ran the property with an unwavering personal vision until her death in 2019.

The Negresco today is 96 rooms and 21 suites arranged across six floors of the original block and the rear extension. Each room is individually decorated; the design language is the unrepentant grand-luxe mode that Madame Augier built up over half a century, antique commodes, hand-painted ceilings, taffeta drapes, Aubusson rugs. There are no two identical keys. The suites are named for the figures who shaped the hotel's mythology (Le Coco Chanel, Le Caroline, the Imperial Suite) and the largest run to 200 square metres with private terraces over the Mediterranean. Rooms on the sea side face the curve of the Promenade and the Baie des Anges directly; courtyard rooms face Niermans' interior gardens and are quieter at the cost of the view.

The Negresco art collection runs to roughly 6,000 works across five centuries, from sixteenth-century portraits of French royals to Niki de Saint Phalle, Cesar, Sosno, and Bernard Buffet. Walking the corridors is the closest thing in a working hotel to a curated private museum, and the works are not roped off. The Royal Lounge, the listed double-height central salon, holds the most-photographed object in the building: a Baccarat chandelier of 16,309 crystals commissioned by Czar Nicholas II that the October Revolution prevented him from collecting. The chandelier hangs above an oval marble floor under Gustave Eiffel's glass dome, and the room is open to non-residents who book afternoon tea or dinner at Le Chantecler.

Le Chantecler is the Negresco's two-Michelin-star dining room under chef Virginie Basselot, a Regency salon of carved walnut and Aubusson tapestries that runs a modernised Mediterranean menu. La Rotonde, the more informal brasserie on the ground floor, occupies a circus-themed room with mechanical horses and a carousel ceiling and serves a daily-changing market lunch that is one of the great unsung values in Nice. Service across the property is formal in posture and warm in execution, the team is long-tenured, and the operating personality is closer to a private house than a corporate property. The hotel is independently owned, has never joined a soft brand, and is classified as a Palace under the French government's superior five-star designation.

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