Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris

Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris

On Avenue Hoche in the 8th arrondissement, a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe and closer still to the jewellers along Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Le Royal Monceau opened on the 1st of August 1928, founded by Pierre Bermond and André Junot and designed by the architect Louis Duhayon with his associates Charles Lefebvre and Marcel Julien, the same partnership responsible for Les Arcades du Lido on the Champs-Élysées. The building was requisitioned during the Second World War, sheltered the headquarters of General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery, hosted Ho Chi Minh for seven weeks during the 1947 Fontainebleau Conference, and provided the room in which David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir signed the founding declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948. It closed in June 2008 for a two-year reconstruction that began with a demolition party, guests handed overalls and mallets and let loose on the old interiors, and reopened in October 2010 under the direction of developer Alexandre Allard and Qatari Diar, with every room reconceived by Philippe Starck. It now counts 149 rooms and suites, including three Presidential Suites, and is one of Paris's dozen hotels carrying the Palace distinction, run today under the Raffles flag with the Starck-era art programme still intact. Starck built the interiors around the idea of a private Parisian apartment rather than a hotel room, so Deluxe rooms of around 40 square metres, Signature Suites near 72, and Lifestyle Suites at roughly 95 come furnished with library shelves, pieces drawn from the hotel's own art holdings of more than three hundred works, and, in several suites, an acoustic guitar left out as though someone had just set it down. The bathrooms carry the ocean-liner doorframes Starck kept from the 1928 building, opening onto mirror-lined rooms with marble floors and baths built for more than one person. Food runs on two poles: Il Carpaccio, the Italian restaurant run with the Da Vittorio family and holding one Michelin star, and Matsuhisa Paris, Nobu Matsuhisa's first restaurant in France since 2016, doing Japanese-Peruvian food under the same roof as Le Bar Long. Pastry chef Yazid Ichemrahen runs the cake trolley that has become one of the hotel's known fixtures. Beyond the restaurants there is a private cinema seating 99, an art bookstore, an Art Concierge who can walk you through the collection room by room, and a 1,500-square-metre spa built around a 23-metre pool, with treatments from Dr. Barbara Sturm and 111Skin. The effect is closer to staying inside a private collector's apartment than a grand hotel, which is deliberate on Starck's part and unusual for a Palace of this scale. Nothing about the public rooms performs the gilt-and-chandelier register that most of the Avenue Montaigne palaces still lean on; the lobby sculptures and the chandelier-hung stairwell read as one collector's taste rather than hotel decoration, and staff talk about the art the way people talk about the contents of their own homes. It suits a guest who wants the address and the service level of a Palace hotel without the formality that usually comes attached, someone who will use the cinema on a wet afternoon and order from Matsuhisa on a whim rather than treat every meal as an occasion. You should not come if you want the classic Parisian grand hotel register, all boiserie and Second Empire gilt; Starck stripped that out deliberately and it is not coming back. You should not come if art you didn't choose to look at, on every landing and in every room, sounds like clutter rather than company. You should come if you want the location and standard of a Palace hotel run with a lighter, more idiosyncratic hand, if the idea of a hotel with a private cinema and a bookstore appeals more than a hotel with a ballroom, and if you'd rather stay somewhere that looks like someone's flat than somewhere that looks like every other five-star on the Right Bank. The short version: A 1928 Right Bank Palace on Avenue Hoche, reinvented by Philippe Starck in 2010 into 149 rooms and suites built around a private art collection, one Michelin star, and Nobu's first restaurant in France.