For a long-time, the segregation of rich and poor has had repercussions on the access to environmental services, resources and functions for these population groups. Today, such environmental inequalities appear as a major challenge for urban and territorial cohesion policy. This paper focuses on environmental inequalities in access to natural/environmental amenities. We argue that an unequal distribution of natural amenities influences both segregation mechanisms and environmental inequalities, and thus contributes to rising social inequality. Due to the stronger preference of richer households for a natural environment, we suppose that poor households are progressively excluded from the access to natural amenities, showing that environmental inequalities have become both a crucial determinant and a contemporary dimension of socio-spatial segregation. The paper aims at i) analysing inequalities regarding the access to natural amenities in two contrasted urban regions with regard to amenity endowment, ii) to estimate the effects of environmental amenities vs. classical location factors on household location decisions of different socio-economic groups and iii) to compare these effects across the two specific urban environments. We use both descriptive analysis methods (location quotients and Lorenz curves) and multinomial discrete choice models to verify our hypotheses.Results indicate environmental inequalities between rich and poor in both urban regions. The effects of natural amenities on residential location choices are more contrasted, and suggest that classical location factors play a dominant role in location choices. As environmental amenities are partially capitalized into housing prices, they seem to enter location decisions through the backdoor.