Fauchon L’Hôtel Paris

Open the pink wardrobe in your room. In most hotels, the minibar is a little test of financial self-control. At Fauchon L’Hôtel Paris, you are encouraged to help yourself. The lacquered cabinet, designed by Sacha Lakic and made by Roche Bobois, holds chocolates, biscuits and other Fauchon temptations, with the complimentary selection replenished every day. Not every bottle behind its doors is free, so check before pouring. Still, a hotel that would rather you ate its biscuits than admired them has understood something about making guests feel welcome.

It is also wonderfully shameless about its origins. Plenty of hotels borrow the names of fashion houses and then pretend they are above selling anything. Fauchon, the Parisian grocer that has been persuading people to buy the extravagant version of lunch since 1886, has simply given you a bedroom above the idea. The surprise is that it can feel less like a showroom than its pink packaging suggests.

Auguste Fauchon started with a food shop on Place de la Madeleine after learning the trade at Félix Potin. Wine, pastries and tea followed, and in 1898 the house opened a salon that made afternoon tea a Parisian occasion. The hotel arrived on the same square in 2018, filling two Haussmann buildings with just fifty-four rooms and suites. Richard Martinet and Paluel-Marmont kept the old mouldings and doors but introduced a palette of pink, black, white and gold that nobody could mistake for discreet. Even check-in has an edible element: you sit in the library with macarons and a tea-based welcome drink instead of standing at a counter.

Upstairs, this enthusiasm for presentation has its advantages. The rooms are bright, the marble bathrooms feel properly indulgent, and the Gourmet Bar is a welcome companion when you come back tired from the city. But choose your room with more care than you choose your chocolates. A Classic is twenty-five square metres, a Superior twenty-nine and a Deluxe thirty-three. For an Eiffel Tower view, the thirty-one-square-metre Deluxe View rooms are actually smaller than a regular Deluxe, and there are only two of them. Two duplex suites have that view too. If the landmark matters, book the named category; if space matters more, do not let the photograph of a balcony make the decision for you.

The Grand Café Fauchon takes the same idea downstairs and gives it a view of the Madeleine's great stone columns. The terrace is a particularly enjoyable place to watch the buses, shoppers and beautifully dressed pedestrians negotiating the square. Inside, contemporary French cooking shares the stage with the house's pastries. In 2026 Fauchon also brought back its Five O'Clock Tea, complete with elaborate little sweet and savoury creations. You could have tea anywhere in Paris. Here you are having it almost where the tradition began for the company, which makes the ceremony rather more fun.

Of course, not everyone wants to live inside a box of chocolates. The colours can be insistent, and Place de la Madeleine is a busy crossroads rather than a romantic backstreet. The hotel has a small spa, a steam room and a gym, but no swimming pool or vast garden in which to hide after lunch. Its restaurant terrace faces the square; there is no separate rooftop bar to plan an evening around. For this sort of money, some travellers will want a grander hotel with more space to disappear into.

Fauchon makes a different proposition. Madeleine métro is a few steps away, the Tuileries and rue Saint-Honoré are an easy walk away, and you can return from either to a room where the treats have been topped up. You are paying handsomely for the privilege, naturally. But after a day of Paris asking you to buy things, there is something rather agreeable about opening a cupboard and discovering that someone would simply like you to enjoy what is inside.