"It is one of the few survivors of the early 20th century hotel industry and one of the last independent establishments of this class. Its facades are based on a neoclassical framework, with opulent quasi-baroque ornamentation. Like the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, the Ritz in Paris or the Hotel Astoria in Brussels, it figures among the mythical places of the luxury hotel industry. It is one of the symbolic places of the city of Nice.
It was born under the impetus of the Romanian Henri Negresco who for many years and in palaces all over Europe, was the irreplaceable butler with extremely wealthy clients, such as the Rockefeller family.
In the 1910s, he cherished the ambition of building his own luxury hotel, on a 6,500 m2 plot of land next to the Villa Masséna. And it is thanks to a few automobile magnates, including De Dion-Bouton and Alexandre Darracq, that his dream became a reality; he entrusted the design of the building to the architect Édouard-Jean Niermans, to whom we owe, among other things, the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, the transformations of the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, the Moulin Rouge, the Casino de Paris or the Mollard brasserie in Paris.
The plan of the hotel adopted and corrected by Negresco recalls that of the Grand Hotel in Madrid built by Niermans, as well as the Parisian Ritz. Legend has it that Henri Negresco had a pink dome built there in the shape of his mistress's breast.
Finally, on January 4, 1913, the palace had a brilliant inauguration attended by more than seven crowned heads. Everyone is ecstatic in front of the large elliptical Louis XVI style hall, the luminous rotunda, the giant carpet costing 300,000 francs at the time or the furniture signed Paul Dumas in the 450 rooms.
The glass roof, as evidenced by its classification as historical monuments, is the work of Édouard-Jean Niermans who designed his buildings in their entirety. Under the glass roof is a Baccarat chandelier of 4.60 meters and 16,800 crystals, originally intended for Tsar Nicolas II of Russia and an identical copy of which is in the Kremlin; the floor of the room is in Carrara marble.
Modernity is not to be outdone: the electrical switches within easy reach, cleaning by air suction, the steam autoclave and the installation of a pneumatic service for distributing mail by tube in the rooms.
In 1914, its brand new facilities suffered from its use as a military hospital. It was returned in September 1918. The compensation procedures to restore it were too complicated and the lack of customers pushed Henri Negresco to ruin. In 1920, a Belgian hotel company bought out his lease.
In 1957, the hotel was bought by Jean-Baptiste Mesnage, whose wife had just undergone surgery. She is in a wheelchair. The Negresco was at that time the only hotel to have a wheelchair lift. Mesnage entrusted the hotel to his daughter Jeanne who had just married Paul Augier, a lawyer and politician from Nice.
It should be noted that at the time, many hotels on the Coast suffered from the Second World War and were sold, cut up into apartments. Its new owners are beginning to enrich it with numerous works of art such as Nana Jaune by Niki de Saint Phalle which sits enthroned in the Royal Salon, portraits of monarchs, numerous busts including that of Queen Marie-Antoinette, and transform thus the Negresco, a hotel-museum which will eventually house 6,000 French works and art objects.
The hotel has its own art studio and employs a restorer, upholsterers, a marble worker and two cabinetmakers from the École Boulle year-round.
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