Hôtel Lancaster Paris

In the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Greta Garbo famously announces, “I want to be alone.” A doctor sitting in the lobby has another observation: people come, people go, and nothing ever happens. He is gloriously wrong. By the end, the Berlin hotel has witnessed love affairs, theft, murder and enough unhappiness to fill several films. Garbo herself would later stay at the Hôtel Lancaster in Paris, a rather smaller establishment that seems to have taken both remarks to heart.

For its hundredth birthday in 2025, the Lancaster did something wonderfully indiscreet. It installed a hundred little numbered doors in its lobby and invited guests to open them. Behind each is a fragment of the house's past: a famous visitor, a forgotten gesture, a story that might otherwise have remained between the walls. The installation is called Les 100 mur-mures, a play on the French word for whispers. After a century of keeping quiet, the hotel has apparently decided that some things are too good not to tell.

There is plenty to choose from. The building was a private mansion before the Swiss hotelier Émile Wolf turned it into a hotel in 1925, furnishing it with antiques and paintings. Marlene Dietrich lived here for several years, and an Érard piano still stands in the suite that bears her name. The painter Boris Pastoukhoff had a more unusual arrangement: when he could not pay his bills, he settled them with paintings. Many still hang around the house. They are lovely works of art, though it is amusing to think of them as some of the most handsome unpaid invoices in Paris.

The interiors have kept something of that eccentric domestic character. Parquet floors, old furniture and an impressive collection of paintings sit comfortably beside contemporary fabrics and newer comforts. The corridors are those of a house that has grown over time, not a hotel planned around an enormous lobby. It has just fifty-four rooms and suites, with a quiet courtyard at its heart. Outside, the Champs-Élysées is barely a minute away, full of shops, traffic and people trying to attract attention. Inside, the main ambition seems to be not to attract any.

Not every room is as generous as Dietrich's. A Superior measures around twenty square metres and looks towards the courtyard; an Executive offers about thirty-five, with a sitting area. The great actress's own suite is considerably larger, with her piano and a terrace. At these prices, there is a difference between sleeping in a charming old house and having enough space to enjoy it. The smaller rooms are best for short stays. And if a view across Paris is the object, choose another hotel: Lancaster's pleasures are mostly on the inside.

The most Garbo-like of them is on the top floor. The private spa can be reserved for an hour, giving two people the hot tub, hammam and terrace with its daybed to themselves. It is wonderfully literal about the desire to be alone, although exclusive use costs extra. Downstairs, the mood has become rather more sociable. Monsieur Lancaster serves relaxed French cooking, while CopperBay, which arrived in 2024, has given the old house a bar with a life of its own. For the centenary, its bartenders devised drinks in honour of former guests: an Old Fashioned for Dietrich, a chocolate martini for Elizabeth Taylor and a dry one for Richard Burton. Apparently even discretion benefits from a good cocktail.

Lancaster is not without its frustrations. The small rooms can feel expensive, there is no pool, and anyone expecting the scale and spectacle of a Paris palace may find it almost stubbornly modest. The grand avenue nearby is convenient rather than intimate, particularly after dark. But for a hotel with so much history, it wears remarkably little of it on its sleeve.

The doctor in Grand Hotel was convinced that nothing ever happened because nobody told him anything. Lancaster has spent a hundred years proving the opposite. Now it will even let you open the little doors and find out for yourself. The reassuring thing is that none of them has your name on it.