It's a timeless picture, one that could be seen in a Johannes Vermeer painting. Beneath a vaulted ceiling stands a nun in a three-quarter profile gazing out the window. The sunlight streaming through the window panes draws an asymmetrical rectangle of light on the wall behind her. The photo was taken by Louis-Antoine Grégo, the architect of the Hôtel du Couvent, which opens in Nice on June 20. It shows Mother Marie-Chantal Geoffroy, the Mother Superior of the Visitation monastery in Voiron, Isère department, posing in April 2019 in a corridor of the Sainte-Claire Visitation convent, where she was first ordained in the 1950s.

The nun, who was the head of the Fondation des Monastères for a time, welcomed the architect with open arms the first time he visited her: "She held up a copy of the Nice-Matin newspaper describing the project, telling me that our vision of hospitality represented a great opportunity for a former convent in ruins," recalled Louis-Antoine Grégo.

Launched over ten years ago, this project to create a luxury hotel is one, if not the most eagerly awaited projects of 2024. Not that the city of Nice lacks accommodation, with a hotel portfolio (the second largest in France) of around 180 establishments catering to the surge in tourists since the pandemic. In a year rich in events – July alone will see the Tour de France and football matches organized as part of the Olympic Games – the Riviera city welcomed three new four- and five-star hotels and a Mama Shelter in just a few months.

But the Hôtel du Couvent, which includes 88 rooms, three restaurants, three swimming pools, thermal baths, a resource center, an open-air market, a bakery and a herbalist's shop in the heart of the old town, presents itself as something quite out of the ordinary. One with a "vision of hospitality" that combines care, food and education, like the one once advocated by the visitandines... or at least an ultra-luxurious version of it, at the end of a project that cost a total of €100 million.

Bringing the convent back to life

Valéry Grégo, the man behind this ambitious project and founder of the Perseus group, is responsible for several notable hotel revivals in recent years, including Le Pigalle in Paris and Les Roches Rouges in Saint-Raphaël. Back in 2003, during his first career as a financial entrepreneur in Nice, he orchestrated the transformation of Le Beau Rivage – the hotel where Henri Matisse once lived and painted many of his masterpieces.

Ten years later, Nice mayor Christian Estrosi thought about Valéry Grégo when he set out to modernize his city's hotel offering, including by resurrecting the Convent of the Visitation Sainte-Claire, located at the top of a wide thoroughfare in Vieux-Nice, below the Chateau hill. The convent is an example of France's fifth-largest city's rich religious architecture. Built in 1604 by the Poor Clare sisters, it was occupied after the French Revolution and until the late 1970s by the Visitandine monastic order. Classified as a historic monument in 1989, the building housed a home for disabled people for a time before falling into disrepair and eventually disappearing behind its perimeter walls and heavy wooden door.

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