Monte Carlo Beach Hotel

Monte-Carlo Beach sits on its own crescent of shore at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, just across the border from Monaco. Roger Séassal built it in 1929 as a curved, ocean-liner silhouette in ochre stucco, and India Mahdavi’s 2009 redesign kept that shape while running deep blue, white and brick red through the interiors. An Olympic-length seawater pool lies along the shoreline below, tiled in blue glass and anchored by two terracotta diving boards, clad in iron the year the hotel opened and renovated a decade later.

What gives Monte-Carlo Beach Hotel its character is that it was never a hotel with a beach attached. It opened as a club and still behaves like one, arranged outward toward the water rather than inward around a lobby, with cabanas, loungers and a pontoon doing the work most hotels give to public rooms. As a wedding venue on the French Riviera, it reads as sunlit, graphic and unmistakably of its own period, with the better part of a century of design language already in the frame.