It was avant-garde at the time. A hotel with 100 rooms, a swimming pool, casino and ballroom outside the historic centre of Saint-Tropez, which in 1932 was still little more than a fishing village. Great ambitions, a huge park of maritime pines and banana trees, reinforced concrete and a modernist architecture that, with its long silhouette and details such as portholes, many windows and chimney, makes it look like an ocean liner.
Latitude 43, designed by Georges-Henri Pingusson from the sign to the dishes, from the furniture to the staff uniforms, was a total work of art. So far ahead of its time that it was not understood by the refined, cultured and wealthy elite for whom it was built, so much so that it stopped being a luxury hotel…