Inside Hôtel du Couvent, a 400-year-old nunnery turned five-star sanctuary in Nice
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When Valéry Grégo went to meet Sister Marie-Chantal, he assumed she knew nothing about him. The hotelier was visiting the nun to explain how he was turning her former home, the Couvent de la Visitation in Nice, into a five-star luxury hotel. However well-known Grégo is in a certain world, thanks to Le Pigalle in Paris or L’Alpaga in Megève, surely Marie-Chantal, who had entered the convent aged 18, would be bemused by this worldly proposition. He was wrong. “I know who you are!” she told him, brandishing a copy of Nice-Matin, its cover plastered with an image of Grégo’s face.
L’Hôtel du Couvent – the convent’s new name – has had a long fanfare. Ten years ago, Grégo got a call from Nice’s mayor, Christian Estrosi: how would he like to turn this venerable building, the first stone of which was laid on 28 October 1604, into a high-end retreat? Home first to the order of the Clarisses until the French Revolution, then the Visitandines thereafter, the 7,500sq m complex, embedded on the higher slopes of the city’s old quarter, had been pretty much abandoned since the late 1980s when the last nun left. Estrosi has spent the past 16 years reinvigorating Nice, even bulldozing its main theatre to create a large “green” boulevard through its core. “He told me, ‘My city needs a proper hotel,’” says Grégo, a rangy, quietly charismatic presence, both arms dotted with fading tattoos. “‘We are in between Cannes and Monaco, and we need more of the modern hospitality!’”
The result posits itself as a palate cleanser for the belle époque city – a fresh new reason to visit a place which, after all, has the second-largest number of museums in France after Paris (and the second-biggest airport too). The Couvent, spread across four discrete buildings, boasts 88 rooms decorated by the interior decoration firm Festen Architecture, three restaurants, several pools and subterranean “Roman baths”. Also: a documentation centre with an archive for the local art movement, L’École de Nice, open to all who seek to study; a space for performances and workshops; a bucolic terraced garden, complete with vegetable and fruit patches; a bakery making bread as it was back into the 17th century; even a herbalist’s apothecary – again, just as there was here centuries ago – where ailing visitors can procure bespoke tisanes for “Chanteur”, “Nuit Paisible” and (the surefire bestseller, apparently) “Intestin Doux”.
“We are aubergistes, even if it’s five-star. It’s not about being showy,” says the chef Thomas Vetele, who will oversee a staff of 48. “The client needs to understand that.” The Negresco, Nice’s venerable art deco institution, 2km away on the main seafront, might reasonably quake.
A Sciences-Po graduate with Masters degrees in history and philosophy, Grégo worked in financial investment from 2000 to 2008: having invested in a few hotels, he went into hospitality more fully in 2010 when he launched the Perseus group. His speciality has been taking neglected locales and making them feel fresh again. Still, “I’m not a hotelier”, he says. Or rather, if he is, “that’s not important. I am the person who makes this place alive.” He refers to most of the people he is collaborating with, or employing, as “friends”, and likes to say he has fallen in love with each and every one of them. “I do hotels to bring the people I love with me, you know?”
This hotel is a €100mn enterprise – his “biggest ever” investment, thanks to a €93mn loan secured back in 2021. He sold off every other hotel (bar Le Pigalle in Paris) in the Perseus portfolio five years ago in order to focus on this project. He didn’t want help from other investors: “I wanted this to be the project of my life.” The size of it does make him pause. “I don’t think about it,” he says. “If I do, I get scared.”
One morning in early May, a small army is still scrubbing, sawing and hammering away, but now and then you stray into a corridor or a bedroom suggesting future calm: walls painted a delicate yellow, sober wooden furniture, fine small paintings and reliefs, vivid bouquets and soaps made by Fragonard wrapped in white and green “Hôtel du Couvent” packaging. “It had a Sleeping Beauty quality,” says Grégo of the site. “And that’s the thing with a Sleeping Beauty: the longer it sleeps, the harder it is to wake up.”
The original team included architect Bijoy Jain, who was already working with Grégo’s brother Louis-Antoine on other projects; Tom Stuart-Smith for the garden; and Festen, who Grégo started working with 10 years ago. Myriam Kournaf Lambert, a proud Niçoise since she was 18, is the hotel’s general manager. From the outset the challenge was, as Festen’s Hugo Sauzay puts it, “how to create a five-star hotel in 2024 in a 17th-century building, lived in by nuns for totally different purposes”. The building is listed; it cannot be altered much.
“For 400 years, this place was a convent – but it was more than that,” says Grégo, who has a 93-year lease on the property. “It was a place for people to live together, to look after people, to host people. The convent was the vessel, now the hotel is the vessel, and later it will be something we might not even know about. It’s about keeping this building together, as a place of culture.”
The immediate challenge was more prosaic: the neighbours. The Couvent is lodged tightly among Vieux Nice’s small old Italianate streets, offering seclusion amid the bustle. Yet this meant the planned building works would be very felt. The main convent building can only provide 38 of the rooms: the rest are found in an entrance annexe, an 18th-century apartment block and a brand new wing designed by Jain and Louis‑Antoine. The neighbours didn’t want it, and took their appeals right up to the highest court in France. They lost. “It’s complicated,” says Grégo with a sigh. “People don’t like change. I’m not sure they knew what they were worried about.” (Apparently relations are cordial now: Louis-Antoine says that the leader of the cause often says hello.)
Festen comprises Sauzay and his wife, Charlotte de Tonnac; they had worked with Grégo on two of his previous hotels. This is their largest project yet but also, because of the nature of the building, their most unobtrusive. Objects and designs are placed in the rooms, rather than welded in; nearly everything is easily removable with as few alterations to the structure as possible. The door to each historic suite is encased by a thick wooden frame, containing the modern circuitry the rooms within require.
“We’d like people to think that we’ve done nothing at all,” says Sauzay. “We didn’t want to do a Disney version of a convent.” They know that Sister Marie-Chantal is one of the invitees this summer. “I hope, when she comes, she’ll recognise the place. I’d be gutted if she didn’t.”
Some describe the style as “neo-monastic” – which means sparse at first glance, rich in detail on closer inspection. Many of the vintage furnishings and the colour schemes come from neighbouring Italy (Nice became French only in 1860, having mostly belonged to the Duchy of Savoy before that). In one room, between the 19th-century oak dining table and huge baroque vase on one side, and the brand new sofa, bed and light fittings on the other, the new just about wins out, but you can’t really tell. “It’s about 80 per cent virtuous architecture,” says Louis-Antoine Grégo, who eventually took over management of the building project. “Which, for a project like this, is pretty good.”
The Couvent incites a certain fervour among its adherents. All very much believe in Grégo, saying only he could have made this happen, and all insist this is the project of their lifetime. Of course, what they are championing – a farm-to-table ethos, respect for the environment, what Grégo calls “slow time” – is not new; restaurants in gentrified neighbourhoods across the world sell you the same. As do, increasingly, hotels: Grégo has called it “the luxury of the future”, but in truth, it is already of the present.
Vetele had almost given up on luxury gastronomy. “It was built on nonsense,” he tuts. “The idea of being able to have everything, all the time, which comes from everywhere.” His cuisine will be local to Nice, many of the ingredients sourced from a farm less than an hour outside the city, with which Grégo has signed an exclusive agreement. “The seasons and the earth will dictate what arrives in people’s plates,” says Vetele. “No flourishes, no emulsions.” And truly, no winter strawberries: only the fraises en sirop that will have been made during the summer months.
The garden, meanwhile, will be laid out like in the nuns’ time, though it will also boast a brand-new pool for swimming lengths. It has had a few hands in it since Stuart-Smith’s first design, leading to an artfully loose style – much of it immediately edible (I am frequently urged to sample it during my visit). Locals will be welcome to roam it, and the will is clearly strong to connect with the neighbours and the wider city. One of the restaurants, a bistro, will only be accessible via the street, each dish of the day available on a sliding price structure. A market will be held in the central courtyard on the weekend, open to all.
“Luxury is so subjective,” says Grégo. “For me, it’s a sense of place.” This project, he believes, is right on time. “These days, people are in search of meaning, belonging, history. And I think the Couvent speaks to that.”
He still swears this is his final hotel project. He jokes it’s like Elton John’s last tour, where he had to give everything one final time. Considering how energetic and ambitious he is, I suggest it’s perhaps more like Cher’s last tours, which are never quite a farewell or final.
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