Belles Rives

Plenty of grand hotels employ a butler for the luggage. Belles Rives has one for courage. Its water-ski butler works from the jetty below the terrace, where he gets guests stretched and into a wetsuit, then talks them through their nerves before a boat pulls them out across the bay of Juan-les-Pins. It sounds like a joke, and it is meant to raise a smile, but it is also the most accurate description of the house: a small, old-fashioned hotel on the water that takes play entirely seriously.

The play started early. Belles Rives began as the Villa Saint-Louis, where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald spent a Riviera summer in the twenties and he worked on a novel. In 1929 the Estène family bought the house and turned it into a hotel, adding an Art Deco wing soon afterwards, and their descendants run it still. Within a few summers, two pioneers started one of the first water-ski clubs on the coast and gave demonstrations right here on the bay, and after the war Juan-les-Pins hosted the sport's first world championship.

The house still wears that era well. The lobby keeps its period furniture and an Art Deco mural, and the old lift takes its time between floors. Bar Fitzgerald, fitted out like the saloon of an ocean liner, has a pianist and an oak floor that has been there from the start. Outside, the terrace sets blue bistro chairs and marble tables above the water, facing the Estérel hills as the light goes.

There are forty-three rooms and suites, and most of them are small. The sensible rule is to pay for the sea before paying for space. A Supérieure Mer measures only twenty-two square metres, but it comes with a balcony just big enough to step onto and the bay in front of it, and the Panoramique rooms have the widest view of all. The rooms on the garden side look out over the holm oaks of the Cap, which is pleasant but rather misses the bay altogether.

Most of the day happens below. A few steps lead down to the private beach and the long jetty, where guests swim off the end or sign up with the water-ski club, which takes children from the age of three. The butler has been known to point nervous beginners towards a skier in their eighties who goes out on the water every day, which tends to settle the matter.

In the evening, La Passagère serves Aurélien Véquaud's Mediterranean cooking on a terrace above the sea, and the bar is waiting afterwards. The fun has a few small costs. The house has no pool, although guests may use the heated one at Juana, the family's other hotel a short walk away, when it is open. Loungers on the beach and the jetty are charged even to guests, and Juan-les-Pins gets loud in high summer. Couples who love the old Riviera, and swimmers who prefer the sea to any pool, will forgive all of it.

Most hotels would send a butler to unpack a suitcase. Belles Rives sends one to the end of the jetty, to unpack a little courage.