Until the spring of 2021, Deauville’s high culture credentials consisted of misty seascapes by 19th-century artist Eugène Boudin, pages from Marcel Proust’s early 20th-century opus in which Swann swans around with his aristocratic pals, and scenes from director Claude Lelouche’s sentimental 1966 movie “A Man and A Woman.”

This isn’t the town’s fault since Deauville was never intended to be “serious” place. A recent creation by French standards, Deauville was mere marshland until a group of rich investors—fronted by Napoleon III’s half-brother the Duke of Morny—decided to develop an Atlantic Xanadu from scratch in the 1860s. Stately pleasure domes, turreted neo-Gothic castles and towering half-timbered manors quickly rose above the dunes after the train link to Paris was established in 1863. Grander and grander hotels opened in the Belle Epoque period preceding WWI, with the Hotel Normandy, which opened in 1912, remaining the prime example of luxury accommodations in the region.

Situated 130 northwest of Paris, proximity to the capital has always been Deauville’s ace-in-the-hole, but generations of loyal visitors never looked for more than good times: horse races, casino gambling, sailing, golf, polo, tennis, shopping (this is the town where Coco Chanel first went retail) and fresh seafood. Notably, the racetrack was in service before the founders got around to planning a parish church. In 1975, the town established the American Film Festival, a largely frivolous and friendly festival held each September with none of the artsy pretentiousness and cut-throat intrigue of Cannes.

In short, experiencing the fine arts in Deauville essentially came down to spotting Jennifer Lawrence sipping café au lait on a hotel terrace … until now.

Having waited over 150 years to make its debut cultural statement, Deauville decided to pull out all the stops. In May, the Mayor of Deauville, Philippe Augier, inaugurated Les Franciscaines, a 21st-century culture and media complex within a recently abandoned and thoroughly renovated 19th-century convent. The complex consists of a library, an auditorium, a museum, an art gallery, creation labs and a restaurant.

The infrastructure was already at hand. In 1875, two Deauville sisters, Adèle and Joséphine Mérigault, commissioned a clinic, a vocational school and an orphanage for the daughters of mariners lost at sea. All of the above were managed by the Franciscan Sisters but by 2011 the few elderly nuns who still lived on the premises were ready to sell up and relocate to a nearby retirement residence with modern conveniences such as central heating.

To qualify the ensuing municipal makeover as a fixer-upper is an understatement: the sadly rundown convent, acquired for four million euros, required another four million for studies and planning, plus a whopping 17-million-euro construction budget. In 2015, the Paris-based Moatti-Rivière architectural firm (the Musée Borély in Marseille; the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris; the new environmentally correct re-do of the Eiffel Tower’s first level; Jean-Paul Gaultier’s design HQ) was selected from over 180 candidates for the renovation.

According to Alain Moatti, “do not destroy” is the prime directive when approaching an architectural project like this. From the exterior, the only new additions are the twinned, 49-feet-high towers that signal the entry. Past the front desk admissions booth, visitors proceed to the former 4,300-square-foot cloister, which has been roofed, lit by a dazzling chandelier composed of 14,285 light tubes, and transformed into every periodical lover’s idea of heaven with comfy chairs and almost every newspaper and magazine available for free reading.

The rest of the ground floor is occupied by a fully modular 230-seat auditorium in the former chapel decorated with stained glass windows portraying the life of St Francis of Assisi; a bookshop; and a classy, health-and-planet-conscious restaurant, La Réfectoire. The latter, located in the convent’s erstwhile mess hall, serves brunches, tea and sweets, and full lunches with delicious options like beet borscht adorned with fresh shrimp, goat cheese, sprouts and pine nuts.

Les Franciscaines’ crowning glory is a 6,600-square-feet exhibition space, diminutive by major museum standards, which provides proof that the old adage “good things come in small packages” often rings true. As an artful transition from the building’s former use, the museum’s opening exhibition focused on depictions of the hereafter and featured prestigious loans.

Les Franciscaines profits from local largesse because Deauville isn’t just any small town. Case in point: A smaller gallery on the upper floor displays short-term loans from Deauville residents… people who just “happen to have” paintings by Pierre Soulages, Yves Klein or Joan Mitchell in their living rooms. The considerable permanent collection of André Hambourg (1909 – 1999; a French artist noted for luminous seascapes) that includes works by his friends Marie Laurencin and Foujita, is on display in a separate gallery.

Whether the high quality of the opening shows will continue remains to be seen, but Deauville has set its sights on making Les Franciscaines a cultural institution of national, even international consequence. See the agenda for current and upcoming exhibitions here.

The extensive library upstairs is also a treasure trove of art and not just of the bookish kind. Les Franciscaines is the repository of the rotating collection assembled by Peindre en Normandie, an association founded in 1992 to celebrate well-known as well as relatively unknown painters who depicted Normandy from 1750 to 1950. Between and above the shelves, browsing book lovers will come face-to-face with actual paintings by Monet, Bonnard, Boudin and others. Many of the Impressionist paintings will be touring Chinese museums for the next few years, but there is still plenty of artwork by the likes of Raoul Dufy and Edouard Vuillard to adorn the walls, as well as a large photography collection that spotlights Deauville past and present snapped by Cartier-Bresson, Gisèle Freund, Peter Lindberg, Mario Testino, Willy Rizzo and Karl Lagerfeld among others.

The library specializes in Deauville history, lifestyle, cinema, children’s literature and equestrian books. (The latter includes a royal riding manual published in 1666.) The magic for most bibliophiles is the library’s wide variety of seating options. There are tables and chairs with places for computers; cozy arm chairs, couches and even full-length beds for people who want to stretch out when they read. As befits a 21st-century media library, Les Franciscaines also offers lectures, interactive digital access and family-friendly workshops.

The library and workshops will likely be of most interest to people with fairly fluent French. Nevertheless, through Les Franciscaines’ exhibitions, restaurant and the sheer pleasure of walking through or sitting in its media libraries, English-speaking visitors to Deauville now have a fascinating indoor culture option for rainy days. And there’s never a shortage of rain in Normandy.

Les Franciscaines, 145B avenue de la République, 14800 Deauville. Tel.: 02 61 52 29 00. Open from 10 :30 am to 6 :30 Tuesday through Sunday; closed December 25 and May 1; open daily during school holidays. A 15€ day pass gives access to all the exhibitions.

Getting There: For Parisians, Deauville is one the closest beach destinations, and for that reason it’s often called the Paris’s 21st arrondissement. Direct trains from Paris’s Gare Saint Lazare train station take about 2 hours 20 minutes. (When the train line was established in 1863, the same trip took six hours!) Les Franciscaines, the racetrack, the casino, the beaches and more are all within a 20-minute walk from the train station.

© 2021, Corinne LaBalme

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There’s no greater sign to a Parisian that she is justly appreciated by her husband, partner or married lover than to be whisked off for the weekend to a luxury hotel within two or three hours of the capital—to the Flowered Coast of Normandy, for example.

Two French female friends of mine in Paris have separately confided in me their dreams of just such a weekend. Not with me, mind you.

For one it’s the dream of a weekend at the Hotel Normandy in Deauville, the most luxury-minded town of the coast. She’s Norman by birth but it wasn’t until recently that she had the occasion to stay at the Normandy during a business meeting. That, she says, gave her a taste for the place. She is now awaiting the proper (or better yet, improper) invitation to return there for a carefree princess weekend a two-hour drive (or train) from Paris. She would do nothing all day but lie on the beach beneath a colorful parasol and make appointments at the seawater spa and sit in a café in town and lounge in the bar before going out for a long late dinner, or call for room service.

The other imagines that there’s nothing more romantic than a weekend at the Grand Hotel in Cabourg. She once walked through the lobby and now dreams of two day/two nights of bathing in a hotel where history and culture walk hand in hand, where she’d enjoy a long promenade along the beach followed by a long lie in the sand while her man tells her amusing stories while she watches sail gliders nearby, before going up to the room for a view that in itself it would be a form of kind of foreplay, and sighful post-play, too.

My two friends are sworn enemies to each other. I can’t invite them both to the same party because they’ll hiss at each other across the room. I don’t understand why. Well, I do, but it’s a long story involving a professional corporation, the French government, and perhaps a handsome stranger at a cocktail party, so it’s better not to go into it here.

Nevertheless, in order to understand my friends better, I set out for a few days from Paris to visit a luxury and otherwise potentially romantic hotels on the Flowered Coast of Normandy. I prefer to go on hotel investigations on my own, but I figured that whichever hotel I was most frustrated to be in alone would get my vote as the most romantic.

The Flowered Coast, la Côte Fleurie, stretches between the estuaries of the Seine and the Orne Rivers. It includes pretty port town of Honfleur, however I’ve set aside Honfleur for now so as to focus this three-part investigation on the area between Deauville and Cabourg.

The D-Day Landing Beaches of June 1944 start on the opposite side of the Orne, so all of the hotels in the three parts of this articles is practically situated for a daytrip to the WWII sites, 45-90 minutes away depending on your point of attack for the war sites. For explorations in the Landing Zone beyond a single day I typically recommend staying within that zone.

The Grand Hotel, Cabourg

All roads lead to the Grand Hotel and the adjacent casino in the planned town of Cabourg, just they lead to the Hotel Normandy and the adjacent casino in Deauville. In both cases, the final approach involves driving around or walking across around a grassy garden to get to the front door.

The Grand Hotel has only 72 rooms, including two vast suites, whereas the Normandy has 290, including 28 suites and apartments, but Cabourg’s garden is more impressive, a manicured circular spaced bordered by villa.

Going around or through the grassy circle feels grand from the start, and it feels grander still to enter the lobby and see, through the opposite end, the walkway above the beach and the sky beyond. It’s that direct access to the shore line that makes the Grand Hotel so special on a coast where the hotels are generally a full block or two from the beach.

My room was on a high floor overlooking the English Channel. The French call the channel La Manche, meaning The Sleeve, but think of it as the sea, as do I. On the afternoon of my arrival the sea is thrown about by a northwesterly wind. I hadn’t intend to take sides so soon on my friends’ Normandy fantasies, but looking out the window at the foreplay of the sea I felt a special affinity to the friend who dreams of weekends at the Grand Hotel. This is the best view of any of the major hotels on the coast.

Yet the Grand, now a 4-star hotel, is no longer as great as it was a century ago. In Deauville, The Normandy and its sister The Royal have five stars. Once rivals, they are now alternatives.

The original Grand Hotel was built on this site in 1861 as one of the first luxury establishments on the coast. For the next 50 years it was mostly uphill for this resort town, and Cabourg became a highly prized beach resort for aristocrats and the upper class during the Belle Epoque of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907 the Grand was built as we see it today. The adjacent casino, now far outshined by Deauville’s, was rebuilt in 1909.

Accompanying the well-to-do on their seasonal stay at the new Grand Hotel was the writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922). He’d visited Cabourg as a child with his grandmother, but the town especially promotes a remembrance to his prolonged stays from 1907 to 1914, a period during which he began work on A la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time). Caboug, which he calls Balbec in his work, is particularly present in the volume entitled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.

Proust’s bedroom, furnished as it would have been at the time, can still be rented (at the same price as any other in its category). It’s among the smaller of the hotel’s 70 bedrooms (there are also two vast suites), but even the smallest rooms here are of comfortable size. Many of the rooms, including my own, are spacious. Rooms on the garden side, facing the town, are certainly appealing. I would sing their praises further were it not for the fact that my stay this time called for that magnificent sea view.

For the past century Proust’s name has been intimately associated with Cabourg. Quotations from his work are posted in the garden in front of the hotel and on the walkway, named Promenade Marcel Proust, between the hotel and the beach.

WWI would put an end to the association of aristocracy with the Grand Hotel, and the Normandy (1912) and the Royal (1913) in Deauville, built to rival the Grand, would eventually take over as the most celebrated hotels of the coast. The Grand Hotel was occupied by Germans during WWII as the local population deserted the town. I remember visiting Caboug in about 1990 and finding it limping along as a handsome has-been property of a chain hotel.

The Grand is now an Accor hotel, a group not known for the personality of its hotels, though its MGallery collection does include some nice properties, including this. (The ambassador of the MGallery collection is the actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who always manages to look so impressively bore.) Recent investments have restored much of the Grand, if not to its historical grandeur at least in such a way that it can hold its head high along the coast.

It’s rather straight-forward in its luxury these days, without surprises and, one might say, without excess (no extra staff to fawn over guests, no spa). A 3k run the length of the promenade is free. For coffee you go next door. There are golf courses a few miles away.

Unlike the Normandy it is not surrounded by a pride of luxury good shops, but a walk around Cabourg town reveals villas that still house discreet well-to-do seasonal visitors. Radiating out from the center of this planned town an aimless stroll reveals magnificent brick-and-stone villas with bay windows, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (The slopes of the nearby resort of Houlgate have them in spades.)

For dinner that evening I went to Le Baligan, a moderately-priced fish bistro a few hundred yards from the hotel. I turned my back to the sullen muzzled blue lobster in the tank in the middle of the room and quite enjoyed the warm atmosphere. Fresh catches are simply prepared and served by men who appear to have recently changed into their waiter gray and blue after spending their youth out at sea. I ordered simple: a heart-warming fish soup with a peppery kick to it, a pleasing smoked haddock with mashed potatoes and carrots.

After dinner and a brief walk on the promenade above the beach, where I nodded kindly to a young terrier leading an elderly man on a leash, I returned to my room. No need to draw the curtains. The room was too big to sit in alone. At 11:30pm I went downstairs to feel the pulse of the hotel at night.

There was a whistle of wind in the hallway on the second floor. There was no one in the lobby. The bar was closed. A sign at the reception desk said “Dial 9.” Another whistle of wind called from the dining room, a grand space that once welcomed fame and fortune and beautiful hangers on and would, in the morning, offer croissants and coffee. It was a wondrous moment, an entire grand hotel for myself. Imagine how this would be à deux!

A town with a more effusive nightlife would allow a solitary travel have a drink the bar at this hour on a weekday. A more fabulous hotel would have some staff in sight. A more expensive hotel would have some luxury goods to promote.

But my friend with the Grand Hotel dream may be onto something. In its own, nearly forgotten off-season way, this may well be the most romantic hotel on the Flowered Coast.

Click here to continue to “Dreams of Romance on Normandy’s Flowered Coast, Part 2: Les Manoirs de Tourgéville.”
Click here to jump to “Dreams of Romance on Normandy’s Flowered Coast, Part 3: Deauville, Villers sur Mer, Houlgate.”

Le Grand Hotel, Jardins du Casino, 14390 Cabourg. Tel. 02 31 91 01 79. The hotel back onto the 2-mile long Promenade Marcel Proust, a nice seaside stretch for a morning jog or an evening stroll. The hotel has its own private beach space and there’s an indoor municipal swimming pool facing the beach by the hotel.

Cabourg Tourist Office, near Town Hall, place de l’Hotel de Ville. Tel. 02 31 06 20 00.

“Romantic Days” Film Festival. Since 1983 Cabourg has hosted an annual film festival in June focusing on romance. The festival has attracted about 11,000 visitors per year in recent years. The major film festival on the coast is Deauville’s American Film Festival, held in September.

Restaurant Le Baligan, 8 avenue Alfred Piat, 14390 Cabourg. Tel. 02 31 24 10 92.

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The Royal and The Normandy in Deauville and Others Hotels and Restaurants on the Coast

The 5-star Hotel Normandy Barriere in Deauville has for some time now been the star of the Flowered Coast, a choice destination for both leisure and meeting travelers who heed the call of luxury in this well-to-do resort and meeting town.

The Normandy Barriere is so well known that despite having set out to test its romantic potential when I’d left Paris two days earlier I ended up on in its sister 5-star, the Royal Barriere, at the opposite side of the Barriere casino. The equally stellar Hotel du Golf Barriere is by the course a few miles inland.

If that sounds like a Barrieres for one town that’s because the Lucien Barriere Group, 60% of which is held by the Desseigne-Barriere family, is inextricable associated with leisure and wealth in Deauville. So is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a personal friend of its CEO Dominique Desseigne. I note that not because a foreign traveler’s sense of romance need be affected by French politics but rather because two days before my arrival a tripartite summit meeting brought together at the Royal President Sarkozy, German Chancellor Merkel and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and an assortment of sharp-shooters among the 1200-strong security force in the area. (All three of Deauville’s Barriere hotels were reserved for participants of the G8 meeting here in May 2011.)

On the way to my room a hotel employee showed me the suite where French president and his wife had Carla stayed. I sat on the bed to test the mattress. The room had a living room, which mine didn’t, but mine actually had a better view, without helicopters hovering above the beach or warships just off the coast.

The Normandy was built in 1912 in what is called Anglo-Normandy style, interpreted here to mean that it’s a massive feel-good manor pea of green half-timbers beneath a steep slate roof. There are 290 rooms facing in all directions, including 28 suites and apartments. Its main entrance is from the town side.

The Royal is more attractive when seen from the beach side. Built a year after its big sister, it’s dressed primarily of stone with winks to the region in the form of inlaid brick and red stripes of paint. The Royal resembles a luxury coastal hotel in New England rather than Old England. Open March through November, it has 252 rooms including 30 suites.

The Barriere style as expressed at the Royal is a classic traditional French grand hotel style, a flowing plush of red carpets with round motifs, thick drapes, heavy furniture and damp blue and reds tones. More recently renovated rooms, however, have straightened some of the lines, Directory-style, though colors remain hearty. Despite the thoroughly modern amenities, the Barriere style as interpreted by decorator Jacques Garcia at the Royal and the Normandy has an intentionally old-fashion air to it. Most rooms are quite spaciousness.

Unlike the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, the channel is not at your feet here since the Royal and the Normandy are several hundred yards back from the beach and low tide withdraws water’s edge even further.

There is a sea view from the 4th to the 7th floors on the north side of the hotels, but a swimming pool, a conference center, tennis courts, pavilion and/or restaurants fill the lower part of one’s gaze. I don’t think of the view as romantic so much as longing, but perhaps there’s a similarity there. My view:

On the opposite site the upper floors of the Royal also offer appealing views to the small-town feel of the residential quarters of Deauville.

Deauville’s American Film Festival draws stars and novas to town in September. The walk of fame is along the boardwalk, with famous names of the screen noted by the changing booths. The view colored umbrellas on a long and wide stretch of beach sand is shorthand for Deauville. But the water on the English Channel is cold and the clouds move in fast. No American in his or her right mind would come to Deauville for a lie on the beach, attractive as it may be, though the British would.

So it isn’t the view of the beach that would make or break Deauville or either of these hotels as a romantic destination.

The Royal has spa facilities and a small pool, a gastronomic restaurant (see other restaurant suggestions below), lobby chairs to sink into, a grand ballroom as breakfast room, and willing service. A seawater therapy center and an Olympic size pool are across the street. The casino is next door and on its opposite side you can get a change of luxury hotel scenery at the bar of the Normandy.

There’s a general sense of well-being in the well-heeled heart of Deauville. There are golf courses in the area and, more significantly, a thoroughbred race track. (Cabourg has a racetrack especially know for trotters.) This part of Normandy is horse country, and Deauville is especially known for its thoroughbred trade and races. It’s a sister city to Lexington, Kentucky and to Kildare, Ireland. The most romantic stroll on the beach of Deauville may well be on horseback.

So many ways in which to fill a two or three leisurely day and a resort-casual nights, even when the Norman sky turns gray.

The Royal is a fine place. I would like to have gotten to know her better. But, alas, a single night was all I had. Still it was enough to understand what my friend is looking for in her 5-star Deauville dream: to be spoiled.

Royal Barrière Deauville, Boulevard Cornuché, 14800 Deauville. Tel. 02 31 14 39 59. Rates vary significantly depending on season and length of stay. Check website High season rack rate typically 480-1535€, with sea views beginning at 605€.

Deauville Tourist Office, in the center of town by Town Hall, place de la Mairie. 02 31 14 40 00.

Restaurant L’Essentiel. 29/31 rue Mirabeau, 14800 Deauville. Tel. 02 31 87 22 11. To contrast with the old-fashion grandeur of the Royal, I went to what I came to think of a lounge bistro, a brightly lit space of clean lines, dark wood chairs and grey walls. There’s also a large patio-courtyard space outside. The 50€ tasting menu was excellent, a delicious discovery, and unParisian in that compared with the capital it was reasonably priced for such a feast. L’Essentiel serves French-Asian fusion, each part recognizable, making it both inventive and traditional, a wise mix of savors without gimmickry. I’m not a big fan of music in restaurants (the amiable director of Manoirs de Tourgéville had called me “old school” when I suggested that the music in the hotel’s restaurant was excessively musical), but I didn’t mind the discreet lounge music here. Owners and chefs Charles Thuillant and his Korean wife Mi-Ra work hand in hand in the kitchen, except when she has a baby in hand. Dishes are served on slate or on Franco-Asian simplified porcelain, tableware appears appropriate rather than gadgety. Accommodating service.
Restaurant Le Spinnaker is a fine fish restaurant on the same street. 52 rue Mirabeau, 14800 Deauville. Tel. 02 31 88 24 40.
If looking to create a chic and easy picnic, you’ll find excellent prepared foods in the center of town at the deli/caterer Breton Deauville, Place Morny.

Notable hotels in other categories in Deauville

La Villa Joséphine (3-star), 23 rue des Villas, Deauville. 02 31 14 18 00. I haven’t stayed at this 3-star but a most reliable source tells me of the charms and refinement of this late-19th-century villa operated since 2005 by Joséphine Petit and located a few block from the center of town. Room rates are 118-348€ (excluding breakfast), discounted pricing possible.

Hotel de l’Espérance (2-star), 32 rue Victor Hugo, 14800 Deauville. Tel. 02 31 88 26 88. In the center of town though calmly situated, this clean, contemporary,10-room, budget-friendly, client-friendly hotel may have three less stars than the Normandy or the Royal and fewer knick-knacks than the Villa Joséphine, but it makes for a private or intimate escape, alone or with a lover. Patrick Bartert, owner along with his wife Murielle, is a former chef who willingly offers his view of the culinary offerings of Deauville and the surrounding area and explains his appreciation for the culinary traditions of Auguste Escoffier (1864-1935). Room rate 100-150€ in high season, 67-99€ in low season.

Between Deauville and Cabourg

Villers sur Mer

L’Outre-Mer (3-star), 1 rue du Marechal Leclerc, 14640 Villers sur Mer. Tel. 02 31 87 04 64. Full of charm and color, exuding playful flamboyance and a feminine touch, the Outre Mer is a friendly and joyful 14-room hotel on a coastal town between Cabourg and Deauville. Half of the rooms have a partial sea view, some with balcony. Romantic, yes, but with its moderate price and the beach across the street it’s also worth considering for family travel or for a writerly pause. Room rates 98-185€ excluding breakfast. Even when your budget sends you to more stellar hotels the tea room here offers a cheery stop (with pastry) while exploring the coast.

Lunch at La Digue de Villers, a fish and seafood restaurant overlooking the beach from avenue de la République in the town of Villers sur Mer. Open daily.

Houlgate

La Villa des Bains (3-star), 31 rue des Bains, 14510 Houlgate. Tel. 02 31 24 80 40. The absence of a grand hotel in Houlgate means that it’s typically ignored while driving between Cabourg and Deauville, but meander along the slopes a few hundred yards back from the coast and you’ll find an astounding array of top-of-the-line mansions built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Meanwhile, in the commercial heart of town and two blocks from the beach (view from four of the upper rooms), Carine and Hubert Courtessi have thoroughly renovated this establishment and turned it into a welcoming streamlined contemporary 18-room hotel from which to explore the area. Room rates 95-160€ excluding breakfast. Hubert is a big fan of golf so golfers will get passionate advice on local courses—well, sometimes you need a break from romance.

To return to Dreams of Romance on Normandy’s Flowered Coast, Part 1: Cabourg, click here.
To return to Dreams of Romance on Normandy’s Flowered Coast, Part 2: Les Manoirs de Tourgéville, click here.

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