HI Hotel Eco Spa & Beach

Class: First

Style: Cutting edge

Rooms: 38

The term design hotel has found wide currency in recent years, and has devolved into a vague superlative, almost without referent. Today any hotel built after 1900 calls itself a design hotel, as though in opposition to those hotels which were not designed but which assembled themselves, of their own free will, from free-floating clusters of furniture, bedding, and masonry.

So it may strain the reader's patience when we refer to the Hi Hotel Eco Spa & Beach as a design hotel, but there is really no more concise way to put it. Every aspect of Hi, from the décor to the toiletries, was designed by Matali Crasset, a Philippe Starck protegé, and the style is somewhat familiar to those who have seen Starck's work — but somehow even more whimsical, more vibrant. A variety of schemes come in a variety of colors, from “White & White,” which resembles a hospital room, to “Digital,” whose walls are covered in foot-high pixels of blue and green, and “Monospace,” in bands of blue, white, and red.

With an organic restaurant and a sushi bar, health is clearly the name of the game, and the bar at the center of the hotel is cheerfully named the Happy Bar. And just when you're in danger of overdosing on good vibes, there's the sun and the sand and the surf. Come for the Côte d'Azur, stay for the hotel (and the spa, and the beach). Many Riviera hotels are palaces, ostentatious, over-opulent. Hi Hotel is no wallflower, and there's nothing particularly subtle about it, but it has personality, and that's (almost) all we ask for in a hotel.