The Penthouse at the Hôtel Martinez: Cannes from the Seventh Floor

The Hôtel Martinez has anchored the eastern reach of La Croisette since 1929, its white art deco facade as much a part of the Cannes skyline as the Palais des Festivals down the boulevard. At the very top of the building, occupying the prime corner of the seventh floor, sits the suite that has come to define the property: a penthouse whose terrace looks clean across the Bay of Cannes towards the Lérins Islands, and whose guest book — never published, endlessly speculated upon — is understood to read like a century of festival juries and red-carpet royalty.

The geography of the suite

What the publicly available plans and the hotel's own materials make clear is that the penthouse trades on two commodities Cannes cannot manufacture more of: elevation and frontage. The interiors, refreshed in the hotel's recent renovation, run to several hundred square metres of bedrooms, salons and dressing rooms in a palette of warm woods, lacquer and deco-inflected curves — a knowing nod to the building's 1920s bones rather than a pastiche of them. The terrace is the true headline: a vast private deck with panoramic sea views, dining space for a party and, during the film festival, arguably the most photographed vantage point on the entire coast.

Why it matters in May

Every account of the suite eventually arrives at the same fortnight. During the Cannes Film Festival the Martinez operates as an unofficial annexe of the Palais, and the penthouse becomes one of the industry's great negotiating rooms — the setting for interviews, junkets and the parties that make the trade papers. Rates in this period are quoted on application and understood to reach the highest figures on the French coast; availability is effectively a matter of relationships rather than booking engines.

Most great suites overlook their city. The Martinez penthouse overlooks its industry, one fortnight a year.

The considered verdict

Outside festival season, the case for the penthouse is quieter but arguably stronger: the same terrace and the same light, with the town returned to its Riviera rhythm and the hotel's beach club and restaurants operating at human pace. As an object of study, it is a lesson in how a suite becomes an institution — not through gold leaf, but through position, history and an address that has meant the same thing for a hundred years. For travellers weighing the Croisette's grandes dames against the Cap's villa hotels, the Martinez penthouse remains the definitive in-town statement.

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