Four Seasons Hotel George V

Every month the flowers at the George V change their subject. Jeff Leatham, the hotel’s artistic director, and seven assistants build some ten great compositions for the hall and public rooms and around a hundred and fifty smaller bouquets for tables and consoles, from about twelve thousand stems, refreshed every day. In most hotels flowers decorate. Here they keep time. The building dates from 1928 and its Flemish tapestries are older still, but the first thing a guest sees on any given day did not exist a month before.

That first thing is the hall. A revolving door turns the traffic of Avenue George V into tapestry, crystal and flowers massed above head height, and from there the hotel opens inward rather than up. Its life runs along La Galerie, hung with tapestries and chandeliers, which follows the windows onto the Marble Courtyard, with Le Bar at one end and, at the other, the two wrought-iron doors of Le Cinq. It is open all day and it is the best seat in the house, because sooner or later most of the house passes along it. The restaurants are set around the courtyard rather than strung along a corridor: L’Orangerie, eighteen seats under a glass roof that looks straight onto it; Le George, the largest and most relaxed; Le Cinq, the grandest.

The pleasure of staying is in how the place changes around you. Mornings begin in Le Cinq, where breakfast is served from seven in a dining room full of daylight, among moulded columns, on linen, china and silver made for the hotel. In the afternoon the gallery turns to tea, with a piano, and in warm weather lunch moves out into the courtyard among the flowers. By evening the bar, all dark panelling and velvet armchairs, is filling for a first drink, and the doors of Le Cinq open on Christian Le Squer’s dinner, three stars for ten years running. Beneath it all, in an old limestone quarry, lies a cellar of nearly fifty thousand bottles.

Upstairs the house turns private. Pierre-Yves Rochon, who has shaped its interiors since the 1999 reopening, spent three years redoing all 243 rooms and suites on the model of a Paris apartment: Louis XVI-style furniture, nineteenth-century pictures, soft colours, balconies turned into small gardens. Rooms start at 37 square metres; the Eiffel Tower and most of the terraces belong to the suites. The flowers follow you up.

A hotel this size, with six stars and 243 rooms, could easily harden into an institution, admired and a little cold. The George V never does, because its grandeur is always occupied, and for a few days the guest is one of the occupants. The gallery becomes a sitting room, the courtyard a garden, and Le Cinq the room where the day began. The building is from 1928. The flowers are from this morning.