How the French Riviera lost its cool
Once beloved of the rich and famous, the French Riviera’s jaded hotspot is no longer the place to be seen, says L S Hilton
Some years ago, I was invited to an August wedding near Grasse in the south of France. The day before the ceremony, there was a lunch at the Carlton, the famous palace hotel on the seafront at Cannes. The 10.5-mile journey took three hours on the Riviera’s traffic-clogged roads and, while the event itself was delightful, the same could hardly be said for the dismal atmosphere of the location.
The Croisette, immortalised by the generations of movie stars who attend the Cannes Film Festival, had a neglected, flyblown air. Many of the luxury boutiques were shuttered up, the Mediterranean was a greasy soup of oil and jellyfish, the whole place was permeated by a smell of decay even stronger than the garlic in the rouille of the bouillabaisse. Crowds of day-trippers plodded listlessly along the front, peering at the ranks of huge super-yachts anchored in the smoggy bay, desperate to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. Chic it was not.
Somerset Maugham may have encapsulated the louche glamour of the Riviera when he dubbed it “a sunny place for shady people”, but nowadays the shadow seems to have very much eclipsed the shine. Overbuilt and overcrowded, the Côte (as the French call it) appears to have lost its status as the playground of the rich and famous, though at Senequier in Saint-tropez they still charge €10 (£8.90) for a coke. Quite simply, the cool crowd has moved on.
Ever since the 19th century, when a season on the Riviera became de rigueur for British and Russian aristocrats, the stretch of coastline between Toulon and the Italian border has enjoyed mythic status. From Queen Victoria to Winston Churchill and the Aga Khan, the Côte was where power came for discreet relaxation and the chance to mingle with fame.
Coco Chanel entertained Stravinsky, Cocteau, Dalí and the legendary film director Luchino Visconti at her villa at Roquebrune; Matisse and Picasso painted there; Noël Coward rubbed shoulders with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Nabokov’s Lolita and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse immortalised the languid days and
To a generation of wealthy nomads, Cannes feels shabby and out of date
torrid nights of Riviera life, while Brigitte Bardot, photographed on the beach at Cannes in a bikini in 1953, injected a dose of insouciant, liberated cool.
It was the presence of “BB” that transformed Saint-tropez from a drowsy fishing village into one of the most exclusive destinations on earth, and where the stars went to play, the money followed. “Anyone in the world who starts to make a large amount of money, be it legitimately or illegitimately, tends to come to the south of France to spend it. Russians, Kazakhs, Americans, Arabs, they all come here,” says Paul Mcguinness, the creator of Sky Atlantic’s hit show Riviera.
Yet the south of France is no longer the place to be seen. Too many rubbernecking tourists and too many paparazzi have sent the international cool crowd in search of more inaccessible destinations. The vast palace hotels of Cannes and Nice feel stuffy and out of date to a generation of wealthy nomads accustomed to a more chilled-out, Soho House vibe. Gilt and white-jacketed waiters just don’t fit with a clientele who demand their destinations ever more unique and unspoilt.
Mykonos and Ibiza are the supreme party islands, but a slew of fresh venues are offering decadence without the bling. Louisa Preskett and Sam Ward, director and creative director of Polar Black, the top events company whose clients include Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Dom Pérignon, agree: “Our high-end private clients are looking for somewhere they can find peace and tranquillity away from the bright lights of Cannes, like Hydra in Greece.”
Italy is also very popular, with Ischia and the Amalfi coast drawing the discerning crowds. Luca del Bono, owner of SKC, one of London’s most exclusive private-members clubs, has long championed the Aeolian Islands, off the Sicilian coast, while the Hotel Pellicano in Porto Ercole is popular with the fashion set. Boats are a big part of the new scene, says Ward. “Our clients want to dip in and out of the excitement, but still find calm at sea,” he says. Anchoring off Patmos in the Dodecanese (where a cool French and Italian crowd have been partying for years) offers far more privacy and exclusivity than bobbing about in the exhausted waters of the Côte, described by the late AA Gill as little better than an open sewer.
Boats also offer the possibility of avoiding a less, ahem, democratic type of tourist, whether in the pristine waters of the strait between Ithaca and Kefalonia or the Atlantic surf off Île d’oléron. The French Riviera is a little bit too easy to get to, and a recent enactment of an environmental law dating from 2006 has only exacerbated the problem.
For a decade, the “beach decree”, which forbade more than 20 per cent of coastline being given over to private enterprise, was allowed to remain a dead letter, but a generation of zealous prefects are now insisting that the Côte’s 607 beaches allow more public occupation. In Juan-les-pins, for example, the number of private beaches will be reduced from 21 to 12 by 2020. The move has sparked what many beach club owners describe as a “civil war”, with legendary restaurants such as Tetou seeing their premises demolished, to be replaced by temporary seasonal structures.
“One can’t destroy 100 years of history in a single blow,” mourns Gilles Esmiol, proprietor of Tetou’s neighbouring restaurant Nounou.
Beach clubs were an essential (and very expensive) part of life on the Côte, but why would you want to spend €200 on lunch if the tats-andtinnies crowd are gawking over the edge of your sun lounger?
Tulum, the spiritual-chic resort in Mexico favoured by a sophisticated gang of Euros and wealthy tech entrepreneurs, has solved the problem by banning coach tours, but for Cannes and its neighbours, it’s looking too late. “This destination is at risk of dying,” says Michel Chevillon, the president of Cannes’s syndicate of hoteliers.
So is Cannes the new Benidorm? Not even. Thanks to super-hip lifestyle magazine Monocle, Benidorm’s architecture is being newly appreciated as a hipster destination for those who like a serving of irony with their full English. There are still gorgeous places to stay on the Riviera – the Cocteau-decorated Grand-hôtel du Cap-ferrat or the Chèvre d’or on the clifftops at Èze – but maybe Blackpool would be a more fitting analogy; tired and tawdry, trading desperately on its past, the fun and the money long gone.
Perhaps Cannes, too, may enjoy a renaissance, but for now, its charms seem bottled up, like the dusty magnums of champagne described in Tender Is the Night, waiting after the Russian Revolution for a clientele who will never come again.
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