L'Eautel

If you know any French at all you can see L’Eautel Toulon Port’s maritime theme coming from a thousand miles away, but as always, it’s not the concept that matters so much as the execution — and here the nautical color scheme and the graphic wave motif are applied with a light touch, lending an air of whimsical fun to this 62-room boutique hotel in Toulon, on the Mediterranean coast between Marseille and St. Tropez. This is a working port city, not an idle beach town; L’Eautel is set on the edge of the old town center, right across from the maritime museum and the Arsenal Toulon naval base.

The hotel’s rooms are bright and breezy, most of them typical double rooms; others, the “crew rooms,” are designed in a dorm-style layout with enough bunks for up to eight guests. And while they’re nautical in style, they’re more spacious and comfortable than ship cabins, with the full complement of no-nonsense contemporary comforts. L’Équerre, the restaurant, is open from breakfast into the night, and occupies a colorful space beneath a 19th-century glass atrium ceiling believed to have come from the Eiffel workshops.