Les Roches Rouges, Saint-Raphaël

The American roadside motel of the 1950s was a simple idea: a row of rooms along an open walkway, and a car parked outside every door. Les Roches Rouges, on the coast road east of Saint-Raphaël, dates from the same decade and keeps much the same bones. Rather than disguise that humble shape, the renovation embraced it. Only the view changed. Where a motel looks at the car park, most rooms here look at the Mediterranean.

Arrival feels almost too plain for the Riviera. The rooms line long galleries of bare concrete, door after door, and many are compact, some of them snug for two. Then the door opens, and floor-to-ceiling windows and a terrace of its own turn the far wall into sea and sky. The room, in other words, is a cabin, somewhere to sleep and change. Life happens outside.

Seen from the water, the building works like a vertical grandstand, its terraces stacked in rows and all turned the same way. Everything that might distract has been taken out. The interiors are pale and spare, with natural materials and soft colours borrowed from the coast, so the eye has one place left to go, which is the horizon. Nothing interrupts it except the Île d'Or, a small red island with a storybook tower, privately owned and left exactly as it is.

Staring at that horizon is the main activity of a stay. The seawater pool, cut into the red rock just above the waterline, touches the open sea right beside it, so a swim tends to wander between the two, and for proper lengths there is a heated lap pool as well. Loungers sit close to the waves, where guests lie for hours barely moving, which is what the grandstand was built for. There is no sand, just pebbles, a wooden deck and a little dock that lead down into the water.

Meals rarely turn their back on the view either. Estelo, on a terrace by the sea, grills fish and cooks Provençal classics, with a long bar for the hour before dinner. La Chicoula, a guinguette under the pines, serves focaccia and cocktails, with music on summer evenings. Neither is formal, and neither needs to be: the best seat at either table is the one facing the island.

This is the Côte d'Azur with its glamour turned all the way down, so the wind and the waves can be heard, and guests in search of a scene will find very little of one. Anyone who needs room to spread out will want a suite. The coast road runs behind the hotel, which fits the motel story, and the season ends in October. Most smart hotels on this coast compete for attention. This one hands it to the horizon, and for couples who want to do nothing but watch the water, there is hardly a better seat.

A motel was built for a single night on the way to somewhere else. This one keeps the shape and drops the hurry, because once guests have found the horizon, there is nowhere else they need to be.