It’s so calm, if you turn this photo upside down, it looks exactly the same

As you’d expect, Deauville is as pretty as a film set; the town centre is dominated by well-preserved Norman-style homes and buildings with timber frontage and pastel decor. The Villa Strassburger stands out from the rest, though. Built on the site of writer Gustave Flaubert’s farm, it became the home of a US general, then starred as Chanel’s workshop in Coco Before Chanel before opening to the public, preserved just as it was in the Fifties. It was like entering a French-tinged set from Mad Men, with a huge oval vacuum cleaner and a personal spa that you sat in and zipped up to your neck.

The views from the house are of the award-winning seafront, where I headed for a stroll along Les Planches, a boardwalk built in 1923 for fashionable Parisian visitors. The art deco cabins and their colourful mosaics are largely still intact, evoking images of flapper girls, bobs and Twenties-style bathing suits.

Next I headed for Café Dupont, famed for serving super-rich chocolat chaud, which last year was named as France’s best hot chocolate in the drinks equivalent of the Palme d’Or. The service was slow but all was forgiven when I got my jug of 70% cocoa hot chocolate (£4), the most intense on the menu. The fresh macarons piled up in the window and the chocolate cocktails were beyond tempting too. On arrival at my hotel, Les Manoirs de Tourgévilles, around 10 minutes’ drive from the centre of bustling Deauville, the calm was striking. The winding country roads and surrounding fields give it the sense of being further away from town than it is, making it feel like a real retreat. It has the welcoming vibe of visiting a friend in their country manor, which makes it easy to understand why so many Parisians come here for a weekend break.

The manor was originally built by Claude Lelouch as a film set, then turned into a house for his friends before being converted into a hotel three years ago. Each room is named after a glamorous film star (Geraldine Chaplin, Anouk Aimee) who visited the house so I tried hard not to feel cheated with Laurel and Hardy above my door.

Discover the luxury of France’s secret film capital