1835 White Palm Hotel

Class: First

Style: Contemporary classic

Rooms: 134

You might expect a place like Cannes to be crowded with excellent hotels, but in a place with guaranteed high occupancy, there’s little incentive to excel, and standards do occasionally slip. So when one of the old guard undergoes a facelift, one hopes for the best — and when a fairly average hotel on the marina is re-invented as the 1835 White Palm Hotel, that hope turns out to be well-founded. The interiors are tastefully contemporary, cosmopolitan in style, less overtly Mediterranean than simply clean-lined boutique-modern. The redesign clearly went more than skin-deep — all the fixtures are modern and the electronics are state-of-the-art. Rooms look out to sea or over the old port, a benefit of the location on the marina rather than the usual strip of La Croisette. Views from the rooftop terrace restaurant are even better, taking in a 360-degree panorama, from the old town to the hills, out to sea and back towards the Croisette. All in all it’s a stylish little hotel, in an unexpectedly fine location that’ll have you wondering what exactly would be the point of staying farther eastward. And perhaps most unexpected of all are the thermal baths, which add an extra dimension to the usual spa and beauty treatments.