Hôtel du Palais

The plan of the building is a letter E, for Eugénie. Napoleon III had the villa built in 1854 and 1855 on the dunes of Biarritz for his Spanish-born Empress, who had known the coast as a girl, and the imperial couple's summers there turned a fishing village into a resort. The Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz is that villa, enlarged and rebuilt, and it still stands alone on its promontory above the Grande Plage with the ocean on three sides.

History

After the fall of the Empire in 1870 the villa passed through several owners and opened as a hotel in 1893, under the name Palais Biarritz. On 1 February 1903 a fire destroyed most of it. The owners called in Édouard Niermans, architect of the Hôtel Negresco in Nice and the Moulin Rouge in Paris, who rebuilt it on the old plan with an extra storey and the dome over the entrance, and the hotel reopened in 1905 as the Hôtel du Palais.

Its guest book in the following decades read like a court circular: Edward VII, Alfonso XIII of Spain, who spent part of each year in Biarritz, and later the Windsors. The town of Biarritz took control of the hotel in 1956 and has owned it since through a municipal company. In 2011 it was among the first hotels to receive the French Palace distinction. It closed in 2019 for a complete restoration, reopening in 2021 under The Unbound Collection by Hyatt, with the town still the owner.

Architecture and design

Niermans kept the E-plan and the imperial character, with a red-brick and stone exterior, a central dome and a rotunda on the sea side that holds the main restaurant. Inside, the scale is that of a palace rather than a hotel: a marble staircase, a long gallery of salons on the ground floor with painted ceilings, and the imperial monogram and eagles that survive on the ironwork. The 2019 to 2021 works restored the salons and rebuilt the rooms and bathrooms while leaving the plan untouched.

Rooms and suites

The rooms and suites occupy the three wings of the E, so most look at the ocean, towards the Grande Plage on one side and the lighthouse on the other. The largest suites are on the first floor in the former imperial apartments. The 2021 reopening reduced the room count to enlarge rooms, a usual trade in a listed building; the exact figure should be confirmed with the hotel.

Dining

La Rotonde is the restaurant in the rotunda, with the sea on three sides, serving breakfast and dinner. A gastronomic restaurant operates in the former imperial dining room in the evening and the bar occupies one of the ground-floor salons. A pool restaurant serves lunch in summer by the terrace.

Wellness

The spa is run with Guerlain, with treatment rooms and a hammam. The heated outdoor pool, filled with seawater, sits on the terrace between the hotel and the ocean, one of the best-known hotel pools in France for its position.

Weddings and events

The ground-floor salons, the former state rooms of the villa, are used for weddings, galas and meetings, and the pool terrace for summer receptions. The hotel is the town's venue for official dinners and hosted the G7 leaders' summit in August 2019, in the middle of its closure for works. Capacities per room are not in our source material.

Location

The hotel stands at 1 avenue de l'Impératrice, at the northern end of the Grande Plage, between the beach and the lighthouse on the Pointe Saint-Martin, five minutes on foot from the town centre. Biarritz-Pays Basque airport is 5 kilometres away and Biarritz station 3 kilometres inland. For a luxury hotel in Biarritz, it is the only one that was built by an emperor.