The Riviera is More

Six destinations. One extraordinary coastline. An entirely different way to experience luxury tennis on the Côte d'Azur.

Ask anyone where to play tennis on the French Riviera and the answer comes instantly: Monaco. And they are not wrong, of course, as the Monte-Carlo Country Club is one of the great jewels of the sport, and the Masters week is an experience every serious tennis lover should have at least once. But to stop there is to miss the point entirely. The Côte d'Azur is not Monaco with scenery. It is one of the most richly layered tennis destinations in the world, stretching 180 kilometres from the Italian border to the Var.

The great secret of the Riviera tennis world is this: the further you look beyond Monaco, the more interesting it gets. The clubs are older, the culture is deeper, and the lifestyle, which includes unhurried lunches, afternoon doubles, aperitivo as the light turns golden, feels less performed and more genuinely, radiantly alive.

At Luxuria, we have spent years exploring every court, club, and coastal path between Nice and Saint-Tropez. This is what we found.

THE DESTINATIONS

Six Places That Make the Riviera Extraordinary

Nice

ALPES-MARITIMES   ·   The Riviera's beating heart

Nice is where the Riviera breathes. It is a proper city, which includes a beautiful baroque old town, flower markets, the legendary Promenade des Anglais,  and it has the tennis culture to match. The Nice Lawn Tennis Club, founded in 1892, is one of the most storied clubs in Europe, hosting its own ATP Challenger event on its sun-drenched clay courts. Play in the morning, lunch in the Vieux-Nice, and spend the afternoon wandering the galleries of the Cours Saleya. This is what the good life actually looks like.

Court Surface: Red Clay

Best Season: March – October

Signature Experience: ATP Nice Open

Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

BETWEEN NICE & MONACO   ·   Peninsula perfection

Cap Ferrat is a peninsula that time forgot to ruin. Tucked between Nice and Monaco, it is home to some of the most quietly spectacular real estate on earth, a handful of excellent private courts, and the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, a hotel so beautiful it makes you reconsider your life choices. Play before breakfast on a private court above the sea. Return for a long dinner. Repeat daily until you cannot imagine being anywhere else.

Court Surface: Hard & Clay

Best Season: April – September

Signature Experience: Private Villa Courts

Antibes & Juan-les-Pins

BETWEEN CANNES & NICE   ·   The authentic soul of the Riviera

If Cannes is the showpiece, Antibes is the soul of the region. Protected by its ancient Vauban ramparts, the old town is a genuine provençal pleasure with its market mornings, rosé lunches, long golden evenings on the port. The Antibes Lawn Tennis Club sits just outside the old walls, its clay courts looking out over a landscape that Picasso painted from his studio in the Château Grimaldi. Tennis here feels connected to something older and more essential. You play better for it.

Court Surface: Clay

Best Season: April – October

Signature Experience: Old Town Morning Play

Èze & the Corniche

BETWEEN NICE & MONACO   ·   Tennis at altitude, views without equal

Perched 427 metres above the Mediterranean, the village of Èze is one of those places that makes you catch your breath — both from the climb and from the view. The private courts along the Grande Corniche road offer some of the most dramatic settings for a morning game anywhere in the world. Play with the sea spread out below you in every shade of blue imaginable, then walk ten minutes to the Château Èze for a lunch that lasts until the light starts to shift. There are few better mornings on earth.

Court Surface: Clay & Hard

Best Season: May – September

Signature Experience: Corniche Court at Sunrise

Menton

GATEWAY TO ITALY   ·   The Riviera's best-kept secret

Tucked against the Italian border, Menton is the Riviera at its most quietly spectacular. Without the crowds of Cannes or the intensity of Monaco, it rewards those who make the journey with Belle Époque grandeur, lemon groves tumbling down the hillsides, and a pace of life that feels genuinely unhurried. The tennis here is social, friendly, and utterly charming, doubles games in the morning sunshine with views across to the Italian coast, followed by the best seafood lunch of your trip. Menton is the Riviera's secret, and Luxuria's great pleasure to share it.

Court Surface: Clay

Best Season: April – October

Signature Experience: Cross-border Day Trip

The Côte d'Azur doesn't have one great tennis destination. It has six, each entirely different, each completely unforgettable. The only problem is choosing where to begin.

THE LIFESTYLE

What ties it all together is the rhythm.

A morning on the Riviera has a particular quality that is very hard to explain and impossible to forget. The light arrives early and golden. There is coffee somewhere, strong and small. The walk to the courts is through streets that are still cool and mostly quiet. And then there is the sound, that clean, decisive crack of ball on string that somehow says, unmistakably, that the day has begun in the best possible way.

Whether you are staying in a hillside villa above Èze, a suite at the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, or an apartment in the old port of Antibes, the rhythm is the same. Tennis in the morning. Something long and wonderful for lunch, a terrace, rosé, perhaps a walk down to the water afterwards. An afternoon that opens out into whatever takes your fancy: a boat, a museum, a nap in the shade of a parasol pine. And then an evening that the Riviera has been perfecting for a hundred and fifty years.

This is not training. It is not a tennis camp. It is the full expression of what the game can be when you play it in the right place, with the right people, in the right light.

The Côte d'Azur understands leisure better than anywhere else on earth. The tennis culture here grew from the same impulse that drew the Victorian aristocracy by rail, the belief that sport, when done properly, is inseparable from pleasure, from beauty, from the quality of the life around it.

That is the philosophy behind every Luxuria journey on the Riviera. We do not separate the tennis from the rest. We build itineraries where the game and the experience are in perfect conversation with each other, where the best morning on court is followed by the best lunch in the village, where the right hotel is chosen because it is not just comfortable but genuinely part of the story.

The French Riviera is a place that rewards curiosity. Go beyond the obvious, and you find something richer, a coastline where every village has its own character, where every court tells a different story, and where the lifestyle that surrounds the game is as much a part of the experience as the tennis itself.

Monaco will always be the headline. But Cannes, Antibes, Nice, Cap Ferrat, Èze, Menton, these are the chapters that make the book worth reading. And the Luxuria team has explored every one of them, so that you can arrive, pick up a racquet, and simply begin.

The Riviera is waiting. It always is. The only question is whether you want the first chapter — or all of them.

PLAN WITH LUXURIA

Ready to Explore All of It?

Tell us where you want to go, how long you have, and what moves you. We'll build the rest — a bespoke Riviera tennis journey that is entirely, unmistakably yours. Every itinerary is different, because every client is.