Hôtel Regina Louvre

Film directors in search of a Paris hotel have a habit of finding their way to Place des Pyramides. The Regina appeared in Nikita and The Bourne Identity, two different films that required the same thing from it: Paris, on demand. A staircase, a chandelier, a lobby dressed for an earlier century: when a script calls for Paris, somebody knows where to put the camera. Actors have a word for being asked to play the same part again and again. The Regina has been typecast for decades.

The casting is understandable. The hotel opened for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and was named in honour of Queen Victoria. A gilded Joan of Arc sits on horseback just outside, the Tuileries are across rue de Rivoli, and the Louvre is close enough to need no introduction. Inside are stained glass, mosaics, chandeliers and dark Art Nouveau woodwork that survived a renovation completed in 2015. It is almost exactly what the rest of the world pictures when someone says "a hotel in Paris". Even the furniture seems to know its lines.

Off camera, the interesting continuity is human. Léonard Tauber and his associate Constant Baverez turned an existing building into the hotel, and Baverez's descendants are still running it four generations later. The family did not keep every room untouched. It kept the business, the character of the building and an unusually good reason not to reinvent either. The restaurant is called Chez Suzy, after the pet name of a grandmother in the family, and there is something disarming about a hotel opened for a world exhibition naming its dining room after somebody's granny.

The Bar Anglais is another piece of casting: red velvet and oak playing Victorian England inside a Belle Époque Paris hotel, the Entente Cordiale expressed in furniture. In fine weather the courtyard becomes an outdoor room, a pause between the grand entrance and the noise beyond. Upstairs, the rooms are less uniform than a film set might suggest. Moulded ceilings and antiques keep the period alive, but not every window is an establishing shot. Some frame the Tuileries with the Eiffel Tower beyond; others look onto the city or the courtyard. The view is a part that has to be cast carefully.

There are compromises the camera rarely shows. The Regina is a substantial hotel of ninety-eight rooms and suites, not a private house, and rue de Rivoli has no intention of falling quiet just because the windows are soundproofed. Some bedrooms are more modest than the public rooms suggest. The recent history is not all preservation, either: a small wellness area arrived in 2018, along with the other unromantic updates that keep an old hotel working. The set is historic. The machinery behind it cannot afford to be.

Film directors keep casting the Regina as a Paris hotel. It is the one role it has never had to act.