There’s one thing you need to know about the fourth season of The White Lotus, the series about a luxury hotel chain which went into orbit in its first season, and that is, where it all happens this time round. The latest is being filmed on the Côte d’Azur, flitting from Cannes to Monaco to Saint-Tropez. So, you may wish to get your holiday plans in order so as to be ahead of this particular curve. Two actual locations for this series are Airelles Château de la Messardière just outside St Tropez and the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, but the best thing to do is to get that Riviera vibe for your hols. Cannes, frankly, isn’t that attractive outside the film festival, when it’s a bunfight, so let me propose two luxury hotels which are bang in the middle of Monte Carlo and St Tropez and need only a couple of corpses for the full White Lotus effect.
The Hotel Metropole is in the Belle Époque tradition of Monte Carlo hotels — there are a number of very grand ones around the centre — a skip and jump from Casino Square where, as you will deduce from the name, the grand casino is. (There are, the benign hotel manager, Klaus Kabelitz, told us, two casinos, of which only one is worth visiting.) Monte Carlo is way less glamorous than it was in the 1950s or when Grace Kelly was princess, but there are elements which still make it notable. One is the Grand Prix, which takes place on the streets. The other is the Casino, which is in a splendid Belle Époque building: all marble pillars, crystal chandeliers and murals of barely dressed nymphs. The less said about the punters, the better: there is as much style in the Piccadilly Trocadero. I mean what doesn’t say Casino Royale so much as slot machines? Then there are the yachts; floating multi-million investment opportunities lined up in the bay, each more vulgar than the last. Then there are the tax exiles, who are fascinating from a people-watching, back-story point of view.
The Metropole is fabulously luxurious. There’s an Italianate exterior with statues over the entrance and masks set into the wall, looking out among panels of jasmine and sprays of roses. It’s very White Lotus. There’s an Italian restaurant, Zia, which boasts very good deconstructed Italian dishes, set beside a dazzling pool ringed with sunbathers. The pool has an unsettling mural by Karl Lagerfeld; a modern reworking of the myth of Odysseus. And here it was I saw a couple who put all the rest in the shade: a man who looked like an ageing prince, and his wife who resembled Sophia Loren in her later years. Charmers both.
We encountered them later at Les Ambassadeurs, presided over by the diminutive genius, Michelin-starred Christophe Cussac. There I had perhaps the best dinner of my life: the dessert trolley has everything you want to eat if you hadn’t already made a pig of yourself on squab with lettuce and lobster ravioli. There we saw our elderly friends again, entertaining guests of their own age, each impossibly glamorous, with the civility of a departing generation. At the close the lady gave my daughter chocolates and little macarons from her table and declared: “I live here! I have to! At my age it is hard to leave my home. Here I am NOBODY!” And she drank more from the glass she was holding tightly. I mean, there’s a story in itself.
The Hotel Byblos in Saint-Tropez channels The White Lotus rather differently. This has the vibe of a 1970s Bohemian era; it’s all Provençal ceramics (including the staircase), Picasso-channelling murals and mosaics, outdoor bar and colourful bedrooms. It was here that Mick Jagger had the wedding reception after his first marriage — he stayed in the presidential suite — and the whole place is like a little village for the beautiful people. It was said to have been conceived as the perfect palace for the local beauty, Brigitte Bardot, who did indeed come to the launch in 1967. It is impossibly extravagant in a laid-back way. The nightclub, Les Caves du Roy, is famous in Saint-Tropez; here you can buy a jeroboam of Perrier Jouet for €9,000 and a methuselah for €25,000 (eight bottles’ worth). At the Skybar, the cocktails — made from rarefied ingredients — start at €50 each.
Oh, and there’s an excellent Sisley spa. During the season, buses ferry guests to the hotel’s own stretch of beach, which has lovely sand, rows of beach loungers and an outdoor restaurant with the freshest of fish. Lots of beautiful people and attentive staff. As a site for a few murders, I’d say it could hardly be bettered.
Junior Suites at Hotel Byblos, from £1,025 byblos.com; Prestige Junior Suites at Hotel Metropole, from £1,125; metropole.com
