Monte Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort – a palace built on the sea itself

Monte Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort occupies the tip of the Larvotto peninsula, a stretch of reclaimed Mediterranean on the eastern edge of the principality where Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer built its first resort hotel, deliberately looser and more contemporary than the belle-époque palaces clustered around the Casino. Raised entirely over the water and inaugurated in October 2005, it was designed as a counterpoint: low-rise, neoclassical, wrapped in arcades and colonnades rather than gilt and marble. It now holds 332 rooms, including 22 suites, the great majority facing the sea across four hectares of garden, waterfall and lagoon. Its centrepiece is Blue Bay Marcel Ravin, the restaurant of Martinique-born chef Marcel Ravin, which carries two MICHELIN Stars, the second awarded in 2022 after the first in 2015. The MICHELIN Guide also lists the hotel itself among its selected addresses in Monte Carlo, a resort built not for the grand tour but for a longer, slower kind of Riviera stay.

01The house

The hotel exists because, in the early 2000s, growing demand for rooms in Monaco pushed Société des Bains de Mer toward a new kind of property, one that could stay within the codes of Mediterranean palace architecture while opening a more relaxed chapter for the group. The result, raised two years later, was an engineering exercise as much as an architectural one: the entire hotel stands over the sea, a technical demand that required the Brussels firm L'Atelier d'Art Urbain and Monegasque architect Louis Rué to design an L-shaped building of three towers angled for maximum exposure to the Mediterranean.

Outside, the building displays neoclassical arcades and colonnades on a peninsula a short walk from Jimmy'z nightclub and the Salle des Étoiles. Around the lagoon's clear sand bottom, billed as a first for Europe at the time, landscape architect Jean Mus planted palms, olive trees, Aleppo pines and cypresses across the four-hectare grounds, while interior architect Pierre-Yves Rochon shaped the public spaces with a play of volume and perspective rather than period ornament.

02Rooms and suites

The 332 rooms and 22 suites are arranged across the three towers, the large majority looking out to sea rather than toward the hills behind. Among the suites, the Rafael Nadal Suite was introduced on the tenth floor in April 2018, and the two-bedroom Diamond Suite Eleven sits at the top of the resort's own collection of informal-luxury addresses.

Insider tip

Reachable on foot from the Casino and Opera in about twenty minutes; direct access to Jimmy'z nightclub.

Decoration favours a warm, contemporary Mediterranean register over the French-palace style of the group's other hotels in town, in keeping with the resort's self-description as a looser, more relaxed take on Monaco luxury.

03Where to eat

Blue Bay Marcel Ravin is the hotel's gastronomic heart: a cuisine built from the chef's native Martinique and reworked through Mediterranean ingredients, including vegetables from the hotel's own organic kitchen garden and fish selected under the Mr Goodfish sustainability charter. Within it, La Table de Marcel operates as a restaurant within the restaurant, a smaller room for closer contact with Ravin and his brigade, open Tuesday to Saturday evenings. Every Wednesday through parts of the year, the kitchen also runs the 5 Elements Ritual, a multi-course menu built around water, wood, metal, fire and earth.

Two further addresses carry a lighter register. L'Orange Verte offers a creative, relaxed bistronomic menu for lunch or dinner, while Las Brisas, open in season between the sea and the lagoon, serves Caribbean-inflected dishes devised by Ravin on a terrace built for long summer lunches.

04The bar

Le Blue Gin, nicknamed the resort's 'waterfront', sits on a heated outdoor terrace with uninterrupted Mediterranean views, open daily from 6.30pm to 1.30am. Inside and out, the drinks list runs alongside a finger-food menu designed by Marcel Ravin, while resident DJ Nicolas Saad plays live from Thursday to Saturday, giving the bar a looser, more nocturnal character than the formal lounges of the Hôtel de Paris up the hill.

05Spa and pool

The resort's water is its real signature. An indoor pool beneath a glass dome, set among tropical planting with its own jacuzzis, opens directly onto a heated outdoor pool, which in turn gives onto a 100-metre sand-bottomed lagoon bordered by the sea, a configuration that won the hotel the Prix Villégiature award for Best Hotel Swimming Pool in Europe in 2019.

Wellness is handled by the SPA Clarins & myBlend, a newly reworked space combining the long-established French beauty house with myBlend, the skincare line created by Dr Olivier Courtin, alongside a hammam and sauna. The hotel has held Green Globe environmental certification since 2014, reaching Gold Standard level in 2018, and switched to solar energy that same August.

06The neighbourhood

Larvotto is Monaco's beach district, built on reclaimed land at the eastern edge of the principality, and the hotel sits at its furthest point, with direct access to Jimmy'z and the open-air Salle des Étoiles concert hall. The Casino de Monte-Carlo and the Opera are roughly twenty minutes on foot, or a short taxi ride along Avenue Princesse Grace, while the hotel's own casino and the Monte-Carlo Masters tennis courts lie within the same stretch of coast.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.