THE STORY BEHIND THE HOTEL · FRENCH RIVIERA SEASON · 04/12
Emmanuel Martinez built his name into a hundred-metre Art Deco façade—then history separated the founder from the hotel. The palace that Cannes associates with flashbulbs also carries a harder story of war, sequestration and a dream its creator never fully recovered.
Fourteen months to build a Croisette giant
Martinez acquired Villa Marie-Thérèse and imagined not a discreet mansion but the grandest modern hotel on the Croisette. Work began on 1 December 1927 under architect Charles Palmero. In fourteen intense months, 490 piles and roughly 450 cubic metres of concrete created a seven-storey landmark. The doors opened on 17 February 1929, just before the world economy changed.
A white liner facing the Mediterranean
The long white façade, stepped terraces and geometric restraint make the Martinez Cannes’ clearest large-scale Art Deco statement. Its architecture was modern in structure and theatrical in urban effect: a bright horizontal liner facing the sea. The building’s width matters; it does not punctuate the Croisette so much as occupy an entire scene.
From the crash to the Festival
The hotel entered Cannes life at the end of the Roaring Twenties, endured economic crisis and was occupied successively during the Second World War. After liberation, ownership became entangled in sequestration and a long legal dispute. Later decades tied the hotel ever more closely to the film festival, where private dinners, interviews and industry rituals turn rooms into temporary worlds.
IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK
The war ended, but Emmanuel Martinez’s battle for the hotel did not. The property was placed under state sequestration under the post-Liberation rules on illicit profits. Martinez was acquitted of collaboration in 1949, yet the company’s property remained entangled in proceedings that stretched across decades; a 1979 law ultimately transferred the hotel to the state as payment. The public kept using his name while the man behind it fought outside the doors.
Cinema without an invented guest list
The Martinez is documented as a recurrent Festival setting rather than as a reliable public register of overnight guests. It hosts the jury’s private opening dinner, and film figures move through its restaurants and salons under press scrutiny. That institutional role is the fact: each May, the hotel becomes part workplace, part stage and part refuge for world cinema.
The founder outside his own dream
Occupation and the founder’s legal struggle complicate the glamour. So does the hotel’s need to evolve without losing the disciplined Art Deco identity that makes it recognisable. The truth is more interesting than effortless legend: the Martinez repeatedly had to be claimed, repaired and reinterpreted.
The 2018 return
A new ownership and Hyatt management chapter began in 2013. A major programme culminated in the 2018 reopening as part of The Unbound Collection by Hyatt, with interiors by Pierre-Yves Rochon that brought white lacquer, blue accents, palms and 1930s references into a lighter contemporary register. L’Oasis du Martinez followed in 2022.
Beach, garden and penthouses
The hotel’s public life revolves around La Palme d’Or, Le Sud, the vast beach and its suites—including penthouses with Croisette views. The garden-like Oasis adds a counterpoint to the highly exposed seafront. Cinema remains present in objects and rituals rather than theme-park decoration.
Room to breathe on the Croisette
Choose the Martinez for scale, beach life and the quieter eastern stretch of the Croisette. It suits travellers who want a palace with resort facilities and immediate access to Cannes, but slightly more breathing room than the blocks beside the Palais des Festivals.
73 Boulevard de la Croisette
Hôtel Martinez is at 73 Boulevard de la Croisette, facing its private beach. The Palais des Festivals is about a twenty-minute walk along the waterfront; Cannes station is similar. Nice Côte d’Azur Airport is around 30 kilometres away.
At a glance
- Address: 73 Boulevard de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
- Official hotel website
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Research desk: primary and authoritative sources
- Hôtel Martinez — official sustainability and history report
- Hôtel Martinez — official hotel page
- Associated Press — Hôtel Martinez and Cannes cinema
- French Court of Cassation — Hôtel Martinez sequestration litigation (2016)
All Wikimedia Commons images are used under the licence shown in each credit. Official hotel imagery, where used, is editorially credited and must be re-cleared for commercial print or paid reuse.
Osama Samaha
Editor-in-Chief — OUISTARS Travel
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