Deauville

Deauville was built, more or less on purpose, as Normandy's answer to the Riviera — a fashionable seaside resort for wealthy Parisians, with a distinctive Anglo-Norman architectural signature (half-timbered gables, dark and white facades) shared across its grand hotels and its 1912 casino. Marcel Proust's fictional Balbec, in In Search of Lost Time, draws heavily on this stretch of coast and its social rituals.

The town's calendar still shapes the casino's rhythm: polo, two racecourses, and the American Film Festival each September bring waves of visitors, while the rest of the year moves at the quieter pace of a well-preserved seaside town two hours from Paris.