Four iconic hotels. A century of Hollywood royalty. And one of them is about to become the most talked-about address on television when The White Lotus returns for its fourth season.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival is underway on the shimmering Côte d’Azur with the sun-bleached boulevards of this storied beachside city filled with filmmakers, A-listers, and the kind of beautiful chaos that has made Cannes the world’s most glamorous film festival since it first took up residence here in the 1950s. Everything about the place feels, as it always has, faintly cinematic — as though the light, the yachts, and the diamonds catching the Riviera sun were all art-directed to within an inch of their lives.
As the competition heats up for the coveted Palme d’Or — the festival’s most prized accolade — celebrities descend on the city for galas, premieres, and the particular kind of socialising that only Cannes makes possible. And when the last air kiss has been exchanged on the steps of the Palais des Festivals, they return to a small handful of legendary hotels that have been hosting Hollywood royalty, European aristocracy, and global cinema royalty for the better part of a century.
These are not simply places to sleep between red carpets. They are, in their own right, institutions — venues for private parties and jury dinners, backdrops for iconic photographs, and stages for the kind of off-duty glamour that the cameras never quite catch. One of them will also transform into the setting for the fourth season of The White Lotus just days after the festival closes.
Here is where the stars will be staying, sunbathing, and celebrating this May.
Hôtel Martinez
Scroll through any fashion feed during festival season and the Martinez announces itself before you read the caption — the sweep of a gold balcony railing, the curve of a blue velvet banister, the unmistakable geometry of an Art Deco interior that has not changed its essential character since the hotel opened in 1929. It is one of the most photographed interiors in Europe, and the hotel knows it. The grand staircase alone has served as a backdrop for Bella Hadid, Irina Shayk, Heidi Klum, and Demi Moore, each arriving to a lobby electric with photographers — a tradition that can be traced back to Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, who once appeared outside the hotel on a camel and, in doing so, established the tone for everything that followed.
The penthouse suites — two of them, each exceeding 1,250 square metres — sit above the Bay of Cannes with views stretching to the Lérins Islands, commanding up to €30,000 a night when the festival is in full motion. On the first floor, La Palme d’Or, the Michelin-starred restaurant by chef Jean Imbert, hosts the festival’s official jury dinner each year; its menu arrives formatted like a film script, its walls hung with cinema memorabilia.
The Carlton Cannes
Alfred Hitchcock understood something about the Carlton that has not changed since he filmed To Catch a Thief here with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant: the building itself is the performance. Its Belle Époque and neo-Renaissance facade — twin cupolas, textured white stone, a silhouette visible from half the Croisette — has been the most recognisable address on the French Riviera since 1911, predating the festival by nearly four decades.
A major restoration added a Mediterranean garden, one of Cannes’ largest pools, and a complete interior refresh, all executed with enough care that the hotel’s essential character emerged intact. During the festival, its terraces and beach cabanas function as an informal industry exchange — the place where the line between lunch and a meeting dissolved long ago, and where much of Cannes’ serious business quietly gets done.
Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic
No hotel in Cannes occupies a more strategically significant position than Le Majestic. Built in 1926 and sitting directly across from the Palais des Festivals, it has spent nearly a century as the natural gathering point for anyone with serious business at the festival — which is to say, almost everyone. This year it marks its centenary alongside the festival’s 79th edition: two institutions that have shaped each other in ways neither fully acknowledges.
The hotel emerged from a 2025 renovation by Isabelle Stanislas with its Art Deco foundations intact and its interiors reborn in a cool nautical palette — polished enough to welcome Kristen Stewart and Dakota Johnson without missing a beat. Behind the room count, the numbers that best capture the Majestic’s scale come from the kitchen: two tonnes of lobster, 50 kilograms of caviar, and over 18,500 bottles of wine and Champagne consumed across a single fortnight. The corridors carry 2,500 photographs of past guests — Paul Newman, Sharon Stone, Al Pacino, Morgan Freeman among them. First-time visitors are advised to listen for the lobby ringtone: the management has chosen the overture to Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which plays on through all of it, serene and slightly surreal.
Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc
There is a passage in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night describing a fictional hotel on the Cap d’Antibes that readers of a certain disposition have always understood as a portrait of this one. The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc began its life in 1869 as a writers’ sanctuary commissioned by Hippolyte de Villemessant, founder of Le Figaro, on a limestone promontory above the sea. By the time hotelier Antoine Sella acquired it in 1887, its identity as a refuge for the distinguished and the restless was already established. The Kennedys came. Orson Welles came. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton arrived together and, on separate occasions, honeymooned here.
Located thirty minutes from Cannes in Antibes, the principal Napoleonic-era château houses more than 100 suites curated by owner Maja Oetker, overlooking a celebrated saltwater pool cut into the clifftop rock — immortalised by photographer Slim Aarons in one of the defining images of postwar Riviera life. Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, and Will Smith are among its festival regulars; Sofia Richie chose it for her wedding. The annual amfAR Cinema Against AIDS gala has been staged here for two decades. Securing a reservation requires patience and the right contacts. At the Cap, that has always been considered part of the experience.
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