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Opened in May of this year, the Thermes Marins is Cannes’ first full-service spa. The 30,000-square-foot hydrotherapy center is built in sleek, clean lines of silver. As you enter the modern lobby, its windows of glass and ochre seem to shift coolly beneath the eye. The facility perches atop the hilly rue Georges Clemençeau, at the easternmost tip of the Vieux Port. Behind a pair of sliding glass doors so discreet they look like the façade of a simple pharmacie lies a sprawling contemporary space.

Thermes Marins operates in conjunction with the newly-installed 1835 White Palm Hotel, a cutting-edge boutique hotel that opened in March. With forty-six treatment rooms plus a fitness room, hair salon, tea-room and terrace restaurant, Thermes Marins offers an extensive à la carte menu of spa services as well as multiple-day programs of intensive whole-body regimes (think total detoxification). Inside the covert space there are endless possibilities: a Nordic sauna, a Roman caldarium, Turkish hammams and Japanese baths. Between services, you can float in the large seawater swimming pool, whose lazy waters stream outside into the open-air, through an opening in a sky-high wall of crystal-clear glass.

For couples, there are three joint-treatment rooms. I asked about group bookings, such as girls’ celebrations or wedding parties: yes, they are familiar with such special requests and can handle them with ease. “Le Bio” is their Japanese-inspired restaurant set on the spa’s bare and breezy terrace, overlooking the Baie de Cannes and the dusky Esterel Mountains.

“Le Bio” restaurant, like much of the rest of Thermes Marins’ spa services, has an intense focus on organic and healthy revival plus a touch of the European régime. It offers personalized meals that come tailored to your treatment: bento boxes of quinoa caviar with cumin, or omega-rich mackerel miso soup with fennel bulb and seeds. The small shop in the spa lobby offers a small selection of fine cashmere and knit items. Also for sale is a large array of haute couture beauty products (which the Thermes Marins solely uses): Dr. Hauschka serums, lotions by Anne Sémonin, and Swiss-made Valmont creams.

Rigorous and modern, ambitious (if not a little overwhelming), Thermes Marins is one of the few truly innovative points of luxury springing from Cannes’ well-loved but old-world ground. I was impressed by this spa’s progressive, conceptual approach. In sheer terms of space and style, this new spa puts to shame the outdated treatment facilities that the region’s luxury hotels offer their high-paying guests.

Indagare Tip: In order to have access to this restaurant, plus the pool, dressing room and sauna facilities, you need to either book more than one service or be a guest at The 1835. Additionally, guests of the hotel can access the spa through an underground passage; regular visitors enter on rue Georges Clemençeau.