Hotel Metropole Monte-Carlo

Joël Robuchon chose the Hotel Metropole Monte-Carlo in Monaco for his restaurant in the principality in 2004, the year the hotel reopened after two years of works led by the Parisian decorator Jacques Garcia. The building had stood on the avenue de la Madone since 1886, one of the Belle Époque palaces built around the Casino in the decades after Monte-Carlo was invented, and the 2004 reopening turned it into the principality's most talked-about address for a decade.

History

The Métropole opened in 1886 on a site that had belonged to the Pope, which is why the papal arms appear on the building. It passed through the twentieth century as one of the grand hotels of the Carré d'Or, lost ground to the Hôtel de Paris and the Hermitage of the Société des Bains de Mer, and closed in 2002 for a complete renovation. Garcia, who had just finished the Hôtel Costes in Paris, redid the interiors in his dense Second Empire manner of velvet, tassels and dark wood. Robuchon's restaurant, Joël Robuchon Monte-Carlo, opened with the hotel and won two Michelin stars. Yoshi, the chef's Japanese restaurant, followed in 2008. In 2012 Karl Lagerfeld designed the Odyssey, the hotel's pool and poolside restaurant, with a glass fresco of his own drawings around the water. In 2017 the hotel opened the Spa Metropole by Givenchy, the first spa to carry the fashion house's name.

Architecture and design

The hotel is entered through a long paved courtyard off the avenue de la Madone, set back from the street behind a fountain and cypresses, which gives it a privacy its neighbours lack. The façade is Belle Époque in cream stone with wrought-iron balconies. Garcia's interiors fill the lobby, the bar and the salons with chandeliers, tapestries and deep upholstery, and Lagerfeld's Odyssey is the one modern counterpoint: white, glass and a photographic frieze of Greek-myth figures.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has 125 rooms and suites, more than half of them suites, decorated by Garcia with silk walls, marble bathrooms and furniture in the styles of the French nineteenth century. The upper-floor suites look over the Casino gardens and the Mediterranean.

Dining

Joël Robuchon Monte-Carlo serves the chef's cuisine from an open kitchen in a dining room that Garcia designed, and it has been the principality's reference table since 2004. Yoshi serves Japanese cuisine in a smaller room with a garden. The Odyssey, by the pool, serves Mediterranean lunches and dinners in summer, and the lobby bar covers the rest of the day.

Wellness

The Spa Metropole by Givenchy occupies a floor of the hotel with treatment rooms, a hammam and a fitness room. The Odyssey pool, heated and open to the sky, sits within Lagerfeld's glass enclosure beside the restaurant.

Weddings and events

The hotel's salons on the ground floor take receptions, dinners and board meetings, and the Odyssey is used for cocktail parties around the pool. Grand Prix week in May fills every room and every salon with sponsors' hospitality.

Location

The hotel stands at 4 avenue de la Madone in the Carré d'Or, two minutes on foot from the Casino de Monte-Carlo and the Place du Casino, with the Métropole shopping centre beside it. Nice Côte d'Azur Airport is about 30 kilometres away, 40 minutes by car or seven minutes by helicopter to the Monaco heliport at Fontvieille. Monaco-Monte-Carlo station, with trains along the coast, is ten minutes on foot downhill. Among luxury hotels in Monaco it is the one that stays independent of the Société des Bains de Mer.