Every design for Cannes

Cannes is famous for its film festival, its luxury hotels and its seafront boulevard, but the people who live here, the Cannois, know a quieter town between the Esterel hills and the bay. Le Suquet, the historic quarter on its hill, once held an eleventh-century tower that looked out over the marshes where the city now stands, and the Lérins Islands lie just offshore, close enough to count as one of the town's own districts.

What the place evokes for most residents is not a red carpet but ordinary seasons by the sea: afternoons on the beach, evenings when the crowds have gone home and the bay turns quiet. The Palais des Festivals et des Congrès and the Musée des explorations du monde are part of that everyday scenery. The town grew from a Ligurian fishing village, and once Lord Brougham built a villa here in the nineteenth century, English aristocrats followed with winter residences of their own.

Walk the Promenade de la Croisette at night and you understand why this stretch of seafront is the one people want to wear.