Your majesty’s suite – ready since 1909

Edward VII never made it to this spa town hotel named in his honour, but it has real regal flair, says Sarah Conway

Is it possible for a hotel to have an identity crisis because it never quite fulfilled its destiny? It is an idle thought, but one that, from the comfort of my balcony – with Lake Geneva glittering in the afternoon sunshine beyond, and the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains clinging prettily to the shoreline right below – drops into my mind like an ice cube into a cocktail.

Behind me, the Hotel Royal shows no sign of an inferiority complex. It is

not there in the gentle elegance of the room – the wardrobe in the corner and the desk along the side-wall both graceful additions to the space, the armchairs by the main window a delicate yellow, the king-size bed an invitation to slumber. Nor is it there in the five-star grandeur of the lobby, spreading out under its pale domed ceiling, an army of staff waiting to relieve you of your bag and have it magically reappear upstairs before you have even noticed that it has gone. And it isn’t there on the terrace, where the swimming pool ripples to the breezes rising off the lake, and the golf course flirts with the view – daring the Alpine panorama to consider its manicured greens and sloping fairways an intrusion on the beauty of it all.

So perhaps the Royal has shaken off the disappointment it must have felt at the beginning of the last century. It opened in the summer warmth of June 1909, taking up its gilded adjective in honour of Britain’s Edward VII, who was a regular visitor to what was (and still is) one of France’s most-feted holiday resorts. But the king died in May 1910, before he’d had the chance to sleep in the suite reserved for his use. The hotel absorbed the news, lowered its head in respect – and decided to keep the name regardless.

Not that the word ever seems out of place, even in a country that conclusively severed its own relationship with royalty in 1848. The setting is too perfect for semantics to matter – for, in lieu of a crown or a throne, you have the joy of a vista that encompasses not one but two nations. Indeed, journey into Évian from the most obvious point of arrival – Geneva Airport, 30 miles (48km) to the south-west – and you will visit both of them. The hotel has a luxury catamaran, the Evian One – which is on hand to deliver incoming guests to the front desk in less than an hour. But whether you board it in Geneva (a 45-minute ride away), or directly north across the water in Lausanne (a shorter 15-minute hop), you do so from a Swiss quayside. Alas, the lake is deemed too choppy on the morning I touch down, yet the transfer by car does not seem a meagre substitute. Switzerland is never out of sight as we roll east into France.

If the hotel does not disguise its finesse – which is immediately apparent as the car eases up the drive – nor does Évian-les-Bains attempt to conceal its good looks. It is, in relative terms, young and gorgeous; a willowy pin-up rather than an ancient citadel – having taken up its place on the map as recently as 1809. It was then, in that first decade of the 19th century, that a road was constructed to link the south side of the lake with the wider world. The spark was the site’s natural springs, bursting out through the Alpine rock – which had been analysed for their health-giving properties in 1807. It was not long before well-to-do travellers were coming in from Paris and Milan, drawn to the hotels that were soon sprouting on the waterline. Some put down stronger roots. Take a walk along the lakefront today, and you pass houses and villas that were built amid the dizzy glow of the belle époque, all society refinement and architectural optimism. Not that the town has moved on too far from the golden days of the early 20th century. Amble a little inland, on Avenue des Sources, and you will see a line of people – tourists and locals alike – waiting to fill water bottles at the Source Cachat, where Évian’s lifeblood pours forth. It takes an apparent 17 years to filter through the cracks in the mountains above. It is worth the wait.

The same mountains offer endless opportunities for cycling – with the Royal providing electric bikes for those who want to gain a little perspective on what an uphill stage of the Tour de France involves, without having to put in hideous Tour de France levels of effort.

But in the end, I do not stray far from the hotel. There is scant need to. The garden is a lovely option for an afternoon stroll, fragrant in the hot air with the scent of herbs and flowers. What waits within is even more relaxing. The massage I enjoy at the Spa Évian Source is perhaps the best I have ever experienced – aromatic oils and pouches of salt being applied to my skin until I emerge in an almost dreamlike state. I have to rouse myself for an evening visit to Les Fresques. I manage this resurrection, just – for it would be a shame not to be fully awake for dinner in the flagship of the hotel’s three-restaurant fleet. The menu is illuminated by chef Patrice Vander’s Michelin star. A blue lobster starter is as fresh as you would expect of a morsel plucked from the lake only hours previously. My main course of pollack, with turnip and a pleasing tang of rum, is no less glorious.

In the room around me – all pale linen and the discreet clink of wine glasses – the hotel continues to avoid its identity crisis. Perhaps because it did, in the end, receive a visit from royalty. Not just cultural royalty, such as Greta Garbo and Edith Piaf, but the Queen too. And, in 1990, the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother –