Hôtel de Crillon

By 2013 the Crillon had one of the great names in Paris and a house that was wearing thin. Its rococo salons were formal, its bedrooms had no central air-conditioning, and much of its reputation rested on a two-star restaurant in a former ballroom, where Jean-François Piège had won his stars. Its own restoration architect would call it dark and somewhat outdated. When it closed that spring, three and a half thousand lots were auctioned, down to the concierge’s pigeonholes.

The house that reopened in 2017 kept the monument and changed its temperament. The managing director wanted a palace that felt “humble, approachable and non-intimidating”, and the rooms were cut from 147 to 124. The designers held old and new in tension rather than blending them into pastiche, and the lobby shows how: higher ceilings, chairs gathered in easy groups, a floor drawn from a seventeenth-century Italian palazzo, mouldings that recall the 1940s, more than two hundred finishes that ought to clash and instead agree.

In the public rooms, the house plays. The two-star restaurant has gone; its room and its name now belong to a bar, Les Ambassadeurs, where the painted sky of clouds and the coloured marble were kept, the chandeliers hung with metal chains and crushed velvet set around tables inlaid with crystal. In the Jardin d’Hiver the stone is dressed in mica and the old chandeliers hang with amethyst drops, so that they glow violet. This is wit worked in very good materials, and it keeps the grandeur from stiffening. Light falls into the open courtyards, where breakfast is served and the grill, Nonos, finishes its cheese soufflé at the table. The renovation set out to give the hotel back to Parisians, and a bar that takes no bookings, with music every night, is built for exactly that.

Upstairs, the wit gives way to craft. The bedrooms are finished with a cabinetmaker’s care: cracked lacquer, hand-blown glass, bedside tables of bronze and shagreen, panelling given a different patina from room to room. At 32 square metres the entry rooms are small for the price, and not always generously shaped; what the money buys is the finish. The suites deserve real admiration. Two on the sixth floor have terraces over the Concorde, and Karl Lagerfeld dressed the two Grands Appartements in greys and silver, with baths that, the hotel says, were each carved from a single two-tonne block of Carrara and lifted in through a window.

The service is cut from the same cloth: check-in in a private salon or in the suite itself, a butler at any hour, staff asked to greet guests like friends rather than with ceremony. The great table is still to come, due in 2027 under Alan Taudon. Plenty of Paris palaces have restored their gilding. The Crillon has learned to wear it lightly.