The luxury hotel group, Maison Albar Hotels, has reopened Hotel Imperator on Ni?mes’ town center’s most stylish square, in the South of France, after an intensive 20-month renovation project involving hundreds of craftspeople. The hotel originally opened in 1929 and was built in an Art Deco style typical of the era by Compagnie des Wagons-lit ? the train company behind the Orient Express ? with the launch of the Paris-Lyon-Marseille railway line.

“Our challenge with this project was to magnify the Art Deco spirit, preserve the soul of this mythical building while giving it liveliness and modernizing the offering,” says Marcelo Joulia, the French-Argentinean founder of Nac?o Achitectures, the firm behind the renovation, and himself a local resident. “This project was fascinating, and I personally chose certain details: the wall and suspension lamps, the limestone of the region whose whiteness and compliments the Mediterranean luminosity.”
“On this project, and for all Nac?o projects, putting spaces into perspective and different arrangements of light was essential. For the Imperator, the creation of the ‘continuous perspective’ was possible thanks to the huge, 4.3x3m, sliding glass panels along the cloister that generate progressive perspective depths ? an incredible and unique work that we thought unachievable.”

The five-star boutique hotel now offers 53 rooms, a spa, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, three res...