Hotel Lutetia, Mandarin Oriental

Hotel Lutetia, Mandarin Oriental

At the corner of Boulevard Raspail and rue de Sèvres, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, stands the only palace-classified hotel on Paris's Left Bank, commissioned in 1910 by Marguerite and Aristide Boucicaut, founders of Le Bon Marché, who wanted somewhere for their department store's wealthiest clients and suppliers to stay a few hundred metres from the shop floor. Designed by Louis-Charles Boileau and Henri Tauzin in a fusion of Art Nouveau and Art Deco that reads, from across the street, as something closer to an ocean liner run aground, the building spent the Second World War requisitioned by German forces and the months after Liberation as a repatriation centre for returning deportees and prisoners of war, a history the writer Pierre Assouline later turned into a novel. Closed in 2014 for a four-year, roughly €200 million restoration under the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, it reopened in 2018 with 184 keys, including 47 suites, across seven floors, the count reduced from an original 233 to allow for larger rooms. It is owned by the Akirov family's Alrov Group, and has been managed since April 2025 by Mandarin Oriental, under whom it was rebranded Mandarin Oriental Lutetia, Paris. Wilmotte's renovation uncovered frescoes buried under decades of paint, relaid the marble floors, and dressed the rooms in Poltrona Frau furniture, chevron parquet and bathrooms carved from Statuario marble, with Hermès silk cushions doing the work of restraint. The stained glass ceiling above the central salon and the frescoes over Bar Joséphine, named for Josephine Baker, once a patron of the hotel, were rediscovered, not reproduced. Food runs across four rooms: Brasserie Lutetia, under executive chef Patrick Charvet, previously of Le Grand Véfour and Les Trois Marches, serves a seafood counter and a seasonal French menu with a terrace onto rue de Sèvres; Bar Joséphine, run by head bartender Angelo Forte, pairs live jazz on weekend evenings with a cocktail list built around caviar toast and champagne; Bar Aristide, named for Aristide Boucicaut, does a quieter, speakeasy version of the same evening; and Salon Saint-Germain, under a painted glass roof by the artist Fabrice Hyber, serves an afternoon tea by pastry chef Nicolas Guercio on weekends. The Akasha spa, added in the 2018 renovation, runs to 700 square metres. What the Lutetia offers that the Right Bank palaces do not is a sense of belonging to the neighbourhood instead of presiding over it: Sèvres-Babylone is a Métro stop away, Le Bon Marché is across the street, and the lunch crowd at Brasserie Lutetia is as often Parisian as it is resident. Service leans personal instead of choreographed, and the public rooms, thick with the ghosts of Gide, Joyce and Picasso, do not ask you to perform reverence for them, only to notice. It suits a traveller who wants central Paris without the theatre of the Champs-Élysées hotels, who prefers reading in the Saint-Germain salon to being seen doing so, and who cares enough about the building's history to want a version of it that has been restored instead of replaced. Since the Mandarin Oriental takeover in 2025, service has tightened toward the group's global standard, a gain in consistency and a small loss of the slightly bohemian looseness The Set Hotels had cultivated since 2018. You should not come if you want a hushed, private retreat: the brasserie and bars are woven into Saint-Germain's evening circuit, not merely for hotel guests, and the ground floor gets loud and social from Thursday to Saturday once the jazz starts in Bar Joséphine. You should not come, either, if what you want from a palace hotel is the manicured grandeur of the Right Bank, since the Lutetia's Art Nouveau bones and its wartime history give it a heavier, more literary temperament than the average five-star. You should come for the Left Bank address, for a hotel that kept its scars instead of sanding them off, and for a room count small enough, even at 184, that you are not just another number on a global loyalty programme. The short version: A 1910 Left Bank palace on Boulevard Raspail, 184 rooms and 47 suites restored by Jean-Michel Wilmotte in 2018, four restaurants and bars built around Josephine Baker's old haunt, and a wartime history as a repatriation centre for deportees the hotel has never hidden.