These stunning pictures tell the story of the world’s most glamorous swimming pool
The Hôtel du Cap’s sexy swimmers are pure summer
“On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach.” So opens F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, a 1934 novel set in the glittering milieu of Mediterranean resorts and the affluent Americans who flocked there after World War I. Fitzgerald found inspiration for his “Hôtel des Étrangers” in the real life Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc—a palatial retreat hugging the cliffs in Antibes, France, which to this day continues to lodge celebrities and billionaires from around the world.
Still unclaimed as a playground for the elite in the 1920s, Fitzgerald was one of a handful of American writers and artists who—bolstered by the advantageous postwar dollar-to-franc exchange rate—hunkered down under the Riviera’s blue skies to party. The hotel, which occupied a former mansion built by newspaper magnate Hippolyte de Villemessant in 1869, was underused when a pair of rich young American expats in Paris rented it for an entire summer in 1923. The couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, invited their circle of artist friends—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Picasso included—to join them, catalyzing the provincial resort’s transition from stuffy winter retreat to a sexy, summertime haven for the glitterati.
Since then, Eden-Roc has become synonymous with the A-list, especially during the annual Cannes Film Festival, when it becomes the first choice of Hollywood film stars looking for a secluded spot to while away their indiscretions. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton honeymooned here; the Kennedy’s were regulars; Kate Moss was banned when she trashed a room after management told her she couldn’t wear a bikini in the hallways. Suites go for as much as $12,000 a night—and until 2006 the du Cap didn’t accept credit cards.
But Hôtel du Cap’s most iconic feature is surely its swimming pool. Perched above the rocky shoreline beneath the hotel, a few meters above the sea, its heated salt waters have enticed celebrities—and paparazzi—since it was built in 1914.
