Hotel Metropole Monte Carlo – Belle Époque bones, Mediterranean soul

Behind a Belle Époque façade a short walk from the Casino de Monte-Carlo, Hotel Metropole Monte Carlo stands on ground that once belonged to Pope Leo XIII, bought in 1886 by the Monte Carlo Hotel Company and built in 1889, designed by Hans-Georg Tersling. Gutted and rebuilt twice since – once in the 1980s under new owner Nabil Boustany, once more in 2003–2004 under French designer Jacques Garcia – the hotel now pairs its nineteenth-century bones with a Mediterranean, art-filled interior. It counts 125 rooms and suites, a Guerlain spa opened in 2025, a pool signed by Karl Lagerfeld, and a kitchen led by Christophe Cussac since 2004, whose restaurant Les Ambassadeurs carries two MICHELIN stars. The MICHELIN Guide itself gives the house Two MICHELIN Keys, a distinction that places it among Monaco's most considered addresses in a principality already crowded with palaces.

01The house

The plot itself has pedigree: the historic location on which the hotel stands once belonged to Pope Leon XIII before the Monte Carlo Hotel Company bought the land in 1886 and raised the original building in 1889 in neoclassical Belle Époque style. Its architect, the Dane Hans-Georg Tersling, was a leading figure of the era who also designed the Grand Hôtel du Cap-Martin and the most romantic wing of the Monte Carlo Casino, though he died debt-ridden and homeless in 1920, a year after the war ended the world that had made his career. The hotel's early decades were glittering, drawing the English aristocracy and the international elite of the Riviera, until the success story continued until the thirties, when the global economic crisis slowed down the momentum.

It reopened in 1988 as Le Metropole Palace, an opening attended by Prince Rainier, Prince Albert, and Princess Stephanie. A second transformation followed in September 2003, when the hotel closed for interior and exterior works before being reborn as Hôtel Métropole Monte Carlo in July 2004, this time entrusted to Jacques Garcia, the interior architect behind Hôtel Costes, the Danieli and the NoMad in New York, for what the house calls an artistic and sensorial rebirth.

02Rooms and suites

Garcia's hand runs through all 125 keys, split between 62 rooms and 63 suites, in a style the designer himself has called a poetic harmony of past and present. The most recent chapter arrived in 2025, when the hotel revealed the first phase of an extensive renovation, introducing 45 newly designed rooms and suites by Jacques Garcia, following an earlier six-month campaign that refashioned fifty rooms into something lighter and calmer than the decorative plasterwork, monochrome marble and gilded woodwork of his earlier, more Third Republic phase.

Insider tip

Book Yoshi ahead; parking is valet-only at €42/day; Odyssey Pool is for guests and Club Metropole members.

At the top sits the Carré d'Or Suite, a 190 square-metre apartment with a 110 square-metre terrace looking out over the Mediterranean, while the Azur Suite trades sea view for ringside seats over the Casino gardens and the Grand Prix circuit below. Junior suites and rooms, from around 22 to 58 square metres, carry the same signature materials – Colefax & Fowler fabrics, limed ash, Carrara marble bars in the larger Deluxe Premium category – that Garcia has used to give the Metropole its particular, Parisian-chic reading of Mediterranean glamour.

03Where to eat

Dinner at the Hotel Metropole means Les Ambassadeurs by Christophe Cussac, the awarded two Michelin stars restaurant that the chef has run since 2004, built on a precise, generous reading of Mediterranean produce. A few steps away, behind a Japanese garden designed by Jacques Messin, sits Yoshi, the hotel's intimate Japanese table set by Didier Gomez in 2008 for scarcely forty covers and recognised with a MICHELIN Plate; nigiri, teppanyaki, black cod marinated in sake and a wagyu rib steak with freshly grated wasabi run alongside sake pairings chosen by the head sommelier.

By the Odyssey pool, the Odyssey Restaurant extends Cussac's Mediterranean cooking into an open-air, water's-edge setting for lunch and dinner through the warmer months, while the Lobby Bar, beneath the lobby's Art Deco glass roof, serves as the hotel's all-day meeting point from morning coffee to evening drinks.

04The bar

The Lobby Bar sits at the physical and social centre of the hotel, directly beneath the seasonal Metropole Mood: a sculptural floral installation that has transformed the lobby with the seasons since 2004, renewed several times a year to dialogue with the Garcia interiors and the paintings around it. It is as much a reason to linger over an aperitif as the drinks list itself, a changing stage-set that turns a simple coffee into something closer to theatre.

05Spa and pool

The other big news is a new, 10-treatment-room spa by Guerlain, which opened in 2025 within a luminous, white-and-gold setting featuring tissue-paper sculptures by French artist Claudine Drai. Facilities run to a hammam, sauna, sensory shower, ice fountain and cold plunge, a Technogym-equipped fitness room, a Pilates and yoga studio, and a Pedi:Mani:Cure Studio by chiropodist Bastien Gonzalez; the spa also houses one of the few Guerlain boutique spaces on the Riviera.

Beside it lies Odyssey, the hotel's heated seawater pool and, inspired by Karl Lagerfeld, the ultimate luxurious Monaco resort experience, covered throughout the winter, al fresco during the rest of the year. It is the only pool in the world Lagerfeld ever designed, built in 2012 around a fresco of eighteen backlit engraved glass panels tracing Ulysses's journey across the Mediterranean, sheltered from the street by a screen of palms and cypress trees and reserved for hotel guests and members of the Club Metropole Monte-Carlo.

06The neighbourhood

The Metropole's address places it at the heart of the Carré d'Or, Monaco's Golden Square, enjoying a unique location only a few steps away from the Casino de Monte-Carlo, with the designer boutiques and gardens of the district spreading out from the front door. It is a position that makes the hotel as much a base for an evening at the tables as for an afternoon by the water, with the Mediterranean itself visible from the upper suites.

07Making the most of a stay

Membership of the Club Metropole Monte-Carlo gives unlimited access to Odyssey and the spa's Heat Experience for those who want to treat the hotel as a standing Monaco address rather than a single stay. Yoshi keeps limited hours – Wednesday to Saturday, lunch from 12.15pm and dinner from 7.30pm – so a table is worth booking well ahead, particularly around the Grand Prix, when the Azur Suite's view over the circuit becomes the hardest booking in the building.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.