Best Luxury Hotels in France
Five Paris palace and near-palace addresses within walking distance of each other, and five estate properties scattered across Provence, the Riviera, and Bordeaux, each built around a specific landscape rather than a city grid.
France’s luxury hotel scene splits cleanly between Paris and everywhere else, and this collection is organised the same way: five addresses within a short walk of each other in the capital, and five estate properties that could not exist anywhere but their own specific patch of Provence, the Riviera, or Bordeaux.
Paris, five ways
Le Bristol, Hotel Plaza Athenee, and Four Seasons Hotel George V carry the official French “Palace” designation and the century-plus reputations that come with it, each with a distinct personality: Le Bristol’s private garden, Plaza Athenee’s red-awning address on Avenue Montaigne, George V’s operatic flower displays. Cheval Blanc Paris, inside the restored Samaritaine department store, is the newest and most architecturally dramatic of the group. La Reserve Paris, smaller and more private than any of the four, sits closest to a members’ club in temperament.
Provence and the Luberon
Airelles Gordes, La Bastide is built directly into a hilltop Luberon village, which makes it as much a base for exploring stone-village Provence as a destination in itself. Chateau Saint-Martin & Spa, on the site of a former Knights Templar fortress above Vence, trades village life for olive groves, vineyards, and a wide view down to the coast.
The Riviera and Bordeaux
Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on Cap d’Antibes, is the collection’s most historically loaded address, its clifftop saltwater pool blasted into rock decades before infinity pools became a design cliche. Lily of the Valley, on the Saint-Tropez peninsula, applies a more contemporary, wellness-forward register to the same coastline. Inland, Les Sources de Caudalie sits inside a working Bordeaux vineyard estate and remains the reference point for wine-based spa treatment, a genuinely original idea when it opened and still the property’s defining feature.
How to choose
A first trip to Paris is well served by any of the three palace hotels; a design-forward return trip suits Cheval Blanc Paris or the more private La Reserve. A Provence or Riviera itinerary works best paired, a hilltop village stay (Gordes or Vence) with a coastal one (Antibes or Saint-Tropez), rather than attempted as a single base, since the drive between the two registers is itself part of the region’s appeal.
The list
10 hotels in this collection
1st arrondissement, Paris, France
Cheval Blanc Paris
A Belle Epoque department store reborn as LVMH's most architecturally ambitious Paris address, with the Seine on one side and the Louvre on the other.
From €2,200 per night
8th arrondissement, Paris, France
Le Bristol Paris
A 1925 Faubourg Saint-Honore palace built around the largest private garden of any hotel in central Paris, and a rooftop pool shaped like the deck of an ocean liner.
From €1,450 per night
Avenue Montaigne, 8th arrondissement, France
Hotel Plaza Athenee
The red-awninged, geranium-lined Avenue Montaigne address that has anchored Paris's couture quarter since 1913, and one of the city's dozen officially recognised Palace hotels.
From €2,100 per night
8th arrondissement, Paris, France
La Reserve Paris
A single restored 1854 mansion off the Champs-Elysees, run as forty rooms rather than four hundred, and rated the world's best hotel by La Liste two years running.
From €1,800 per night
8th arrondissement, Paris, France
Four Seasons Hotel George V Paris
An Art Deco palace on the Golden Triangle where six Michelin stars, a legendary flower program and a newly reimagined set of rooms keep a century-old address at the front of Paris hospitality.
From €1,950 per night
Gordes, Luberon, France
Airelles Gordes, La Bastide
A 16th-century manor built into the ramparts of a hilltop village, run as one of only two dozen hotels in France to hold the official Palace title.
From €950 per night
Martillac, near Bordeaux, France
Les Sources de Caudalie
A hamlet of six houses built inside a working Bordeaux Grand Cru estate, where the Cathiard family invented wine-based spa treatment in the 1990s and still farms the vines outside the window.
From €590 per night
La Croix Valmer, Saint-Tropez peninsula, France
Lily of the Valley
A Philippe Starck hillside hamlet above Gigaro beach, built less as a hotel than as a working theory of what rest and fitness can do together.
From €700 per night
Cap d'Antibes, France
Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc
A saltwater pool blasted into the clifftop rock in 1914, a documented supporting role in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, and eight decades of Cannes Film Festival history add up to the most storied address on the French Riviera.
From €2,200 per night
Vence, above the Riviera coast, France
Chateau Saint-Martin & Spa
A 12th-century Knights Templar commandery turned Relais & Châteaux estate, its own olive groves and vineyards spread across a Vence hillside above the Mediterranean.
From €1,050 per night