Architect Alexandre Durville designed this building to be the largest casino in Europe, and it opened in 1912 as the Casino Municipal de Trouville, built in just fourteen months on a stretch of Normandy coast that had drawn artists and, later, Parisian high society since the 1830s. The building’s fortunes shifted with the century’s wars: it served as a military hospital during the First World War and as a major Allied headquarters after the D-Day landings in the Second.
Between those chapters it spent time as the town’s museum, from 1937 to 1956, before a thalassotherapy center called Les Cures Marines opened in its west wing, offering seawater treatments that thrived for a few decades before falling out of use as French health insurance stopped covering them. The building sat dormant for years until Accor and the Cofinance Group restored it, reopening as a hotel in 2015 under the direction of French architect Jean-Philippe Nuel.
