Inside the Iconic Hotel Featured in White Lotus Season 4
Known as the most coveted spot for Hollywood’s A-listers during the Cannes Film Festival, Hôtel Martinez is finally ready for its own close-up
There is perhaps no hotel more inherently theatrical than Hôtel Martinez. For decades, the Art Deco landmark has been the celebrity nexus of the Cannes Film Festival, which wraps up this week. There’s Bella Hadid dripping in Chopard jewels for a photo call in the porte-cochere, Demi Moore racing through the lobby to her seat at the annual jury dinner at Jean Imbert’s Michelin-starred La Palme d’Or, and Dua Lipa checking in to host the nearby Nespresso Beach Club event. And then the paparazzi—circling the entrance behind barricades, ladders in tow, vying for the shots that will dominate the morning’s entertainment headlines.
Now the Martinez is ready for its close-up. Filming for Season 4 of Mike White’s cult hit The White Lotus will take over its miles of Yves Klein blue carpet in the coming months.
Across three seasons, the hotels in The White Lotus are never really the neutral backdrops they are first presented to be. In Maui, the fictional White Lotus (Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea) featured staff trained to anticipate every need and absorb every indignity, making the guests’s entitlement grotesque by contrast. Sicily’s White Lotus (San Domenico Palace, Taormina, a Four Seasons Hotel), a former 15th-century monastery, used its cloistered stone corridors as a physical mirror for characters trapped in versions of themselves they couldn’t escape. Thailand’s White Lotus (Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui) scattered its guests across individual villas, the rarefied isolation mirroring an existential drift that no amount of Buddhist symmetry can resolve. In each case, White chose properties whose architecture and design, by their very nature, force tension.
Now, as The White Lotus heads to France—and, namely, Cannes—for anyone who has spent time at Hotel Martinez, the casting is not a surprise. While details of the actual shoot are under lock, key, and ironclad NDA, here is what can be revealed about the five-star main character at the center of the drama.
The hotel opened in 1929, built by Emmanuel Martinez. The seven-story Art Deco landmark was designed to be seen. Its facade rises above the Croisette, with the adjacent beach club La Plage du Martinez facing the ocean, and L’Oasis, the pool-and-spa enclave, tucked behind. The Four Seasons properties in Hawaii and Thailand were retreats—places offering a sense of distance from the world; the Martinez offers no such distance. It sits on one of the most-photographed promenades in Europe, and has done so for nearly a century.
Pierre-Yves Rochon understood this when he undertook the hotel’s renovation, completed in 2018. Rather than preserve the Martinez as a monument to itself, he softened it—ivory lacquer, sea-glass blues, pale marble, curved millwork inspired by vintage yacht interiors. Balconies of scrolled wrought iron frame the Mediterranean like film stills. In standard rooms, sliding bathroom panels wrapped in hand-painted de Gournay fish wallpaper can conceal or reveal the bathing space behind them.
A custom chandelier cascades from the ceiling in bronze and parchment scales, flooding the entrance with golden light. Nearby, a stylized portrait of Emmanuel Martinez himself, painted by artist Alan Walsh, watches from the wall. The grand staircase, which connects all seven stories, is perpetually crowded with photo teams, hair-and-makeup crews, and dressed-to-the-nines celebrities and wannabes angling for Instagram gold. The famously compact elevators force A-listers and civilians into the kind of fleeting proximity no publicist would ever sanction. In Le Sud, the hotel’s all-day lobby bar, sculptural figures anchor the room—white, columnar, vaguely classical—set against a ceiling mural drawn in the style of a Cocteau sun, gold lines radiating across white plaster.
La Plage du Martinez, redesigned by Remi Tessier, features director’s chairs embroidered with the names of Hollywood royalty, like Grace Kelly, Martin Scorsese, Cary Grant, and Audrey Hepburn, lining the dining deck. Brass fittings, lacquered wood, and nautical navy run through the interior alongside Bernardaud tableware and Biot glasses, the whole room evoking a vintage Riva. White Lotus guests would unravel here beautifully, over chilled rose and the shame of a sun lounger that belongs to someone else.
La Palme d’Or, the hotel’s Michelin-starred dining room, reopened in 2024 and, also designed by Tessier, commits to the cinematic theme. Menus are crafted to resemble film scripts. Dishes are presented like storyboards. A coat-check receipt is printed like a movie ticket. Old posters, handwritten scripts, and props sourced from Hollywood studios are scattered throughout a dining room resembling a 1930s yacht interior—lacquered wood, a monumental chandelier reinterpreting the Palme d’Or above the central table, portholes offering glimpses into the wine cellar and kitchen.
The penthouses, named for Isabelle Huppert and Thierry Fremaux and inaugurated in 2021, occupy the entire seventh floor. Connected, they are among the largest suites in Europe. Rochon designed them as two distinct personalities: the Huppert suite, in a warm run from white to cream to gold, with its Cocteau-inspired objects and made-to-measure rugs suggesting a luminous cocoon; the Fremaux suite, conceived as a men’s boudoir, midnight blue and black, projecting something more mysterious. From the terrace, a 180-degree panorama takes in the full arc of the Bay of Cannes.
When the Croisette overwhelms, L’Oasis du Martinez waits on the other side. Designed as a botanical garden with a shade garden of ferns and misting trees, a sun garden planted with lavender, jasmine, agapanthus, and sage, and a heated outdoor pool tiled in deep Yves Klein blue, it’s a world apart. The garden won France’s national landscape prize in 2024.
So it may be The White Lotus’s next leading lady, the Martinez is not the only property to enter the Season 4 conversation. As they have with other seasons, the crew will be filming across France. Further down the coast, the Airelles Chateau de la Messardiere perches above Saint-Tropez on 13 hectares of umbrella pines and cypress, a 19th-century estate that spent the Roaring Twenties hosting Gatsby-esque parties before Airelles acquired it in 2019 and handed the redesign to Christophe Tollemer, who played the terracotta floors, Provencal pastels, and Anglo-Moorish domed cupolas into something simultaneously historic and effortlessly now. Rooms open onto private terraces overlooking Pampelonne Bay.
Another confirmed location is Mandarin Oriental Lutetia, Paris, the Left Bank’s only Palace-designated hotel. Jean-Michel Wilmotte stripped it back to its bones during a four-year renovation completed in 2018, recovering eucalyptus paneling, Statuario marble bathtubs carved from single blocks, and original artworks by Cesar, Arman, and Takis.
What White has planned for these three properties is anyone’s guess. What isn’t: millions of viewers will get an intimate look inside some of the most storied hotels in Europe—and as the storyline goes, one of the fictional White Lotus guests won’t make it to checkout.