Cheval Blanc Paris

When LVMH chose La Samaritaine for its first city hotel, the doubt wrote itself. The building had been a department store. The interiors went to Peter Marino, best known for the group’s fashion boutiques. Here was the risk of a flagship you could sleep in: a great deal of money, beautiful objects, flawless surfaces, and very little warmth.

Cheval Blanc Paris, open since 2021, answers that doubt, and the answer lies less in what was spent than in how completely it was spent. Start with the rooms. The architect Édouard François moved the lifts into the inner lightwell so that all seventy-two rooms and suites could keep the store’s great windows. Inside, some twenty marbles, leather, parchment and hand-painted patinas reward a hand as much as an eye. The smallest rooms, at 45 square metres, still have a marble bathroom with a large bath and a walk-in hammam shower, and a dressing room of their own. One button darkens the room when Paris has been enough. Someone has thought about how a guest actually lives for a few days, and then thought again.

Most of what makes the house nearly perfect cannot be photographed. The lifts and stairs were doubled so that guests need not ride up with the dinner crowd. The staff work from a building of their own, joined underground. A majordome looks after every room at any hour, to polish shoes or run a bath by candlelight, and in-room dining will try to bring anything, at any time. Expensive perfection on display asks to be noticed. This kind asks nothing; it simply removes the friction.

The same standard holds wherever you go. Plénitude, Arnaud Donckele’s restaurant, holds three Michelin stars, keeps its service relaxed rather than formal, and writes out its bouillons and vinaigrettes for guests to take home. Hakuba holds two. Seven floors up, Le Tout-Paris holds one and stays open until one in the morning, its terrace taking in Notre-Dame, Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. Below the street, a thirty-metre pool runs beside a digital fresco of the Seine. Few hotels anywhere keep so many things at this level under one roof, and fewer do it with only seventy-two rooms.

The group’s great names are here, and openly: the spa carries the Dior name, with its products on sale beside it. The surprise is how little the house feels like a showroom. Marino furnished it like the apartment of a collector with nerve, with Vik Muniz’s outsized Eiffel Towers in the lobby, a Frank Gehry horse by the lifts and Sonia Delaunay lithographs along the corridors. It holds France’s Palace title, and it behaves like a maison. The achievement is not the budget. It is the translation of that budget into hospitality, room by room and hour by hour. Many hotels in Paris are perfect to look at. Very few come this close to being perfect to live in.