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All year round, the Hotel Le Petit Palais welcomes you in a benevolent and family atmosphere for all your stays on the heights of Nice. During your stopover in one of our 25 comfortable rooms, you will appreciate the diversity of our 4-star services and our concierge service. Let yourself be tempted by relaxing stays on the French Riviera in our hotel in Nice!

Discover the Hotel Petit Palais
Charming hotel in Nice

Charming hotel for insiders
Petit Palais & secret pasts

In the district of the Hotel Petit Palais, along the winding streets and detours which mark the heights of the Hill of Cimiez, villas and palaces in Belle Époque style reveal their romantic appeal. Around the quiet hotel, the poetry of their names awakens the imagination: Valrose, Nobili, Bellanda, Liserb… 

  • What are the very private stories of these homes and palaces?
  • Who are the happy privileged people hidden by the ornate facades and avenues of lemon trees?
  • Do we need to know it… or is it simply not more pleasant to imagine it and experience it?

Secret Palace

The Petit Palais is one of those charming hotels that carefully guards its secrets. Today a 4-star boutique hotel with only 25 keys, the place has the gift of taking its guests to a dream break. 

Once upon a time in 1924, a certain Madame Thomas, who approached the architects Victor Martin and Charles Palmero to build her a villa in the Carabacel Park. With one facade on avenue Emile Biekert, the other on avenue du Bois, this villa consisted of two large apartments.

The owner immediately settled in comfortably on the ground floor and pleasant garden level with her son and his “miss” housekeeper; Was Madame Thomas an emancipated upper-class woman, a wealthy muse, a refined rentier attracted by the winter socialities of Nice?

We can only leave it its mysteries...

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Intuitions of Madame Thomas

Today, only one certainty: the initiator of the place was a woman of taste and character.

Her choice of late Belle Époque architecture suggests that Madame Thomas did not want to give in to the Art Deco madness of her 1920s. The scent of nostalgia of the fruit garland moldings, the cornices with timeless flowers and others neoclassical decors have taken the Petit Palais through the century with tireless elegance.

In addition, by choosing the architect Charles Palermo to imagine her beautiful, refined residence, Madame Thomas had the intuition to contact the man who, a few years later, would also design the famous Martinez Hotel in Canes.

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Cimiez: Palaces of the past & Hotels of the present

While at the end of the 19th century, most of the luxurious buildings on the Cimiez hill – such as the Riviera Palace or the Excelsior Régina – were initially designed as hotels for wealthy winter visitors, from the 1920s onwards, they were successively dismantled into various apartments.

The situation is quite different for the Hôtel Petit Palais: originally created in 1924 as an exclusive and very private villa, it then opened up to carefully selected guests, until it remains today with integrity a boutique hotel for insiders.

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Hospitality at home

It seems that it was from 1926 that Madame Thomas welcomed her first guests on the first floor of the Petit Palais, which subsequently became a refined hotel–pension.

It was also that year that Madame Thomas had a garage built at the villa - automobiles being at the time a prerogative of modernity and the subject of a competition of elegance, as just launched by the Automobile Club de Nice.

It’s easy to imagine the idyllic setting that the Petit Palais offered for aesthetes’ getaways in very small, cultivated groups.

Contrasting with the bygone ostentation of the surrounding palaces, a new, more intimate type of hospitality was born at the Petit Palais.

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Discretion recognized

Did a Renault 40CV park at 17 avenue Émile Biekert in 1926?

Would its driver have been none other than the French playwright and actor Sacha Guitry? There is no doubt that this prolific author of the theater, then of the French cinema would have found at the Petit Palais of Nice a haven of peace and discretion. 

Known for his audacious witticisms and his amorous escapades, but also envied for his insolent success, one imagines that Sacha Guitry needed to recharge his batteries away from the Parisian tumults that he provoked. 

The view of the Baie des Anges would have inevitably regenerated his verve as an incorrigible bon-vivant, unless the lemon trees of the Petit Palais had sharpened his pen even more, although often acidic but so lively in spirit.

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Art de vivre incognito

To live happily, staying hidden is perhaps one of the keys... Who knows?

Continuing the welcome given to certain celebrities of the last century, it turns out that the team at the Hotel Petit Palais today takes particular care to make the 'pleasant hotel, and to surround the stays of its guests with perfect serenity.

With its four stars steeped in history, the Petit Palais houses a treasure destination away from the crowds. Deliberately off the beaten track of the city and yet at the epicenter of Nice's cultural beauties, this quiet Nice hotel perpetuates its very own residential charm. Here, the Belle Époque atmosphere is not just a nostalgia for the past.

It is also a tribute to the Beautiful Moments, those to enjoy in the most pleasant present.

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