Hôtel du Palais Biarritz

In July 1854 Napoleon III decided to build a summer residence in Biarritz so that Empress Eugénie could be closer to her native Spain. That year the couple bought several acres of dunes in the town and gave the engineer Dagueret the job of creating a summer home with gardens, woods, meadows, a pond and outbuildings. Building ran from the end of 1854 to the summer of 1855, and not smoothly: the emperor first appointed Hippolyte Durand, architect of the Basses-Pyrénées department, but in June 1855 Durand was replaced by Louis-Auguste Couvrechef, architect of the crown and the imperial domain. Each year the imperial family spent most of August and September here, travelling with a small entourage, and from 1856 until the couple's last stay in 1868 the villa was the scene of lavish parties for European high society.

The original Villa Eugénie was built of brick and stone in the Louis XIII manner, as a long main building with three perpendicular wings. Victor Huguenin dressed the facade with Corinthian columns and reliefs of arms and crowned eagles. A chapel designed by Émile Boeswillwald was consecrated in September 1865; its eclectic blend of Roman and Byzantine art carries Hispano-Moorish elements from Seville and Granada, and Alexandre-Dominique Denuelle and Louis Steinheil painted its decoration. In 1867 the villa was renovated, and Auguste Lafollye raised it by one storey and added a cowshed and a sheepfold to the estate.

After the empire fell in 1870, the fate of the villa and its contents was debated in parliament and it was agreed that the state would take the most valuable furnishings; when Napoleon III died in 1873 the property passed to the Empress. In the early 1880s she sold the estate to the Banque de l'Union Parisienne, and the villa became a hotel-casino, the Palais Biarritz. It was taken over in 1893 and renamed Hôtel du Palais; in 1893 and 1894 the Parisian architect Octave Raquin, who also owned it, turned it into a hotel and added the large angled wing. Royal guests followed, Queen Victoria and Empress Elisabeth of Austria among them.

Fire swept through the building on 1 February 1903, and of the imperial estate only the chapel came through unharmed. The fashionable architect Édouard-Jean Niermans rebuilt the hotel by 1905. He kept the exterior walls, tying them into a new reinforced-concrete structure that was very modern for its time, and gave the building neo-Louis XIII facades of brick, stone and slate in the spirit of the original villa. He extended the south wing, added two storeys and built a large bay holding a semicircular restaurant that looks over the sea, while inside he provided larger salons for entertaining and a ballroom in Second Empire style. The ground plan forms a letter E in reference to the Empress's first name, yet little else of the Villa Eugénie remains: the neighbouring chapel is the only complete survivor of the imperial residence.

The rebuilt hotel drew the international elite. King Edward VII of the United Kingdom stayed several times in the 1900s and found that the sea air eased his breathing, and in April 1908 H. H. Asquith came to the hotel so that the king could make him prime minister in succession to the dying Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Biarritz was known in the 1920s as the 'queen of resorts and resort of kings', and Alfred Savoir chose the hotel as the setting for his high-society comedy Un Homme. After Spain became a republic in April 1931, many Spanish nobles moved in, close to the border, to wait until they could go home. Later decades were harder: the hotel fell into disrepair and closed for a period in the 1950s.

The facades and roofs were listed as historic monuments by decree on 24 December 1993. In June 2017 the town of Biarritz, which then ran the hotel through a semi-public company, ended a year of exclusive talks with the Four Seasons group after disagreeing over the considerable investment that renovation and modernisation required, and in 2018 the hotel joined Hyatt's Unbound Collection. The hotel closed for a major renovation in October 2018, and on 24 and 26 August 2019 it hosted the heads of state gathered for the G7 summit. When the MICHELIN Guide created its Keys for hotels in April 2024, it awarded the Hôtel du Palais two of them, the level it describes as an exceptional stay, and its current listing still shows Two MICHELIN Keys.

Early visitors were not always charmed by the position. An English magazine in 1858 noted that the villa looked out over 'the cruel grey expanse of the Bay of Biscay' and likened the village to the outskirts of Brighton, and an account from 1867 found the house bare and bleak-looking, exposed on every side to the wind. Pictures from about that time show it isolated on a rugged coast; as Biarritz grew, the town closed in around it. Today the building stands on the town's main beach, and the MICHELIN Guide observes that it is built so close to the sea that there is something to look at in every direction, while rating the rooms that face the bay as the most desirable.

Arrival is by a grand driveway through historic grounds. Inside, the MICHELIN Guide finds even the simplest doubles dressed in rich fabrics and period furniture, and the suites suitably grand.

The hotel's main restaurant is La Rotonde, which fills the large semicircular bay that Niermans added during the reconstruction, looking out over the sea. He designed the room's interior decor as well, and its murals, by the painter Paul Gervais, take the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece as their theme. The MICHELIN Guide credits the room with unmatched sea views.

Alain Ducasse, who was married at the hotel, has called La Rotonde the most beautiful dining room in the world. In 2011 the interior architect Philippe Belloir renovated the restaurant, together with the bar and the Eugénie lounge, and La Rotonde has its own entry among the MICHELIN Guide's restaurants.

The pool has its own place in the hotel's story. In 1957 the hotel opened a so-called Californian pool filled with seawater at 21°C, and the American singer Frank Sinatra, invited to the opening, was given cabaña number 1.

Under the direction of Jean-Louis Leimbacher, who retired in 2015, the estate gained a large independent spa, set in a building designed to match the main house on the opposite side from the terrace pool. Its decoration was entrusted in 2004 to the interior architect Philippe Belloir.