Hôtel Métropole Monte-Carlo

The Métropole opened in 1889 and has outlived most of what Monte-Carlo has built around it since. It sits in the Carré d'Or, a short walk from the Casino and the water, behind a garden watched over by Roman statues. In 2004 Jacques Garcia reworked the interiors, and his hand is everywhere, warm and heavily dressed, closer to a grand private house than a hotel lobby. The rooms, around 125 of them and more suites than standard doubles, carry the same weight of fabric and colour. Unusually for this address, the hotel stands apart from the Société des Bains de Mer that runs the principality's other palaces. It has stayed privately held, and you feel it in a staff that works the place like a household rather than a brand.

The table

The gastronomic room reopened in July 2023 as Les Ambassadeurs by Christophe Cussac, and within nine months it held two Michelin stars, renewed again in the 2026 guide. Cussac has run these kitchens since 2004, back when Joël Robuchon set the house style, and his cooking now reads as precise and Mediterranean. Alongside it sit Yoshi, the Japanese room, and Odyssey, the restaurant on the covered pool terrace that Karl Lagerfeld conceived.

Why it's in VANE

Monaco is easy to file under surface, and VANE had nothing from the principality until now. The Métropole is the reason to look again. It is a real nineteenth-century palace rather than a tower, independently run, with design that rewards a slow look and a kitchen holding two stars in a square kilometre thick with them. The Guerlain spa and the heated seawater pool carry the quiet months, when the terraces along the coast shut down. Take a suite high in the building, where the roofs of Monte-Carlo fall away to the sea, and let the address do the rest.