Le Negresco

Museums close at six. The Negresco never does. On Nice's Promenade des Anglais, the pink-domed hotel is a collection of some six thousand works of art, a seaside address with the beach across the road, and a city hotel in a place that keeps going long after the summer visitors have gone. Few grand hotels on this coast manage those three identities at once. The question is not simply how impressive its rooms are, but what it feels like to live among so many competing things.

The answer is lively. In the morning, guests cross the Promenade towards N La Plage. Later, people gather beneath the Salon Royal's enormous Baccarat chandelier or take a table at La Rotonde, the brasserie shaped like a carousel. By evening the bars have found a different company: people celebrating and people returning from the city. Le Negresco does not offer the studied hush of the capes. It belongs to Nice, and Nice makes itself heard.

The spectacle owes much to Jeanne Augier, who took charge in 1957 and filled the hotel with art from many centuries, without much concern for whether one style matched the next. A royal portrait may share the journey with a work by Niki de Saint Phalle. The restored façade and pink dome keep the building unmistakable from the street; indoors, some of the strangest encounters happen on a staircase or outside a lift. Upstairs, 102 rooms and twenty-eight suites carry the same freedom of taste. Their decoration varies widely, so the view and the particular room matter more than the general name of the category.

There is serious luxury beneath the theatricality. At Le Chantecler, Virginie Basselot, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, cooks Mediterranean food in a grand historic room with a Michelin star. N Le Spa has brought an indoor pool, sauna and hammam to the house, while breakfast is another occasion. The sea-facing bedrooms make the strongest case for staying here: Nice's broad bay does as much for them as any piece in the art collection.

The most private pleasure comes late. After dinner, when the public rooms begin to empty, the corridors become a gallery that hotel guests can revisit at their own pace. A sculpture appears at a landing, another painting beyond the stairs. It is a different experience from visiting a museum with a crowd and a closing announcement. Because the hotel is open through the year, that quiet hour belongs to a January stay as much as a July one.

The eccentricity is not without cost. A busy coastal road separates the hotel from the shore, the décor can be overwhelming, and the rooms vary enough in character that not every one will feel equally desirable. The lobby and lifts have to serve a large, active house, and the beach loungers are not simply part of every room. Travellers expecting the secluded ease of a small Riviera hideaway will find a city, and a considerable amount of theatre, still going on around them.

In most museums, the guards eventually ask everyone to leave. At Le Negresco, the doors stay open, the bars fill up and somebody brings breakfast in the morning. It is the rare museum in which the collection has to make room for the people sleeping upstairs.