7.9Avenue Marceau, Paris
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Paris hotels have always borrowed the most famous name in the neighbourhood. The Opéra, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower: a few minutes on foot is enough to put a monument over the door. The hotel at 64 avenue Marceau has gone one better and borrowed two. It is called the InterContinental Paris Champs-Élysées Étoile, and it stands on neither. Avenue Marceau runs down from the Étoile towards the Seine, and the address is a good deal less famous than the name.
The name-dropping is an old habit. The hotel opened in 2008 as a Crowne Plaza, became the InterContinental Paris Avenue Marceau in 2009, and came back from a two-year renovation wearing its grander title. The address never moved, and the scale remained modest. There are fifty-five rooms and suites on five floors, in three historic buildings gathered around a courtyard: a small household for a brand more used to signing its name across entire city blocks.
What the hotel does not need to borrow is inside. Venetian-style ceiling frescoes were already part of the hotel in 2009; the later facelift, by decorator Alexandre Danan, paired them with clean-lined contemporary furniture. In some rooms, the result is an odd, rather charming combination: a modern bed under a painted Venetian sky. Beneath a glass roof, Mido Paris serves Nikkei cooking, the meeting of Japan and Peru, so that even dinner arrives with two names attached. The hotel’s more interesting geography is indoors.
Upstairs, the names on the room list deserve closer reading than the one above the entrance. A Cosy room measures fifteen square metres, a Classic nineteen, a Premium twenty-three. The hotel’s detailed room list names a Junior Suite Tour Eiffel and a Prestige Suite with Terrace. An Eiffel Tower view or a terrace belongs to a particular room category, not to the hotel's own name. A hotel named after two landmarks can still give you a bedroom facing neither. The useful words are in the room description, not on the sign outside.
Even the avenue has changed its name. It was once avenue Joséphine, after Napoleon’s first wife, and became avenue Marceau in 1879, after a general of the Revolutionary Wars. Paris has always liked putting reputations on its maps. The Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe are a short walk away, yet a slight bend in the avenue denies the hotel a straight view of the Arc, and it is Marceau, not either landmark, that waits outside the door. The distance does the hotel no harm: it stands a little apart from the spectacle it advertises.
There are compromises. Fifteen square metres is a small bedroom however grand the name above it, and a fitness room is no substitute for a swimming pool. Nor should an address off the Champs-Élysées be mistaken for a promise of silence. The hotel offers the reassurance of an international brand at townhouse scale, without a palace’s lobby life or an afternoon’s worth of facilities. The brand on the door is larger than the building behind it.
The old name, InterContinental Paris Avenue Marceau, was the more modest one. It was also the more accurate. Painted ceilings, a courtyard and fifty-five rooms are what is worth coming for, and none of them needed a famous neighbour to vouch for them. If the hotel must drop a name, Marceau would serve it perfectly well.
Under glass since 2009
The dining room has opened onto the courtyard since the first InterContinental day: once Le M64, now Mido Paris.
The Venetian-style frescoes were already part of the hotel in 2009, and the decorator Alexandre Danan kept them overhead while replacing almost everything below: pale fabrics, dark wood panelling and a marbled carpet. The contrast is the point of the room. Not every bedroom has a painted ceiling, and the official room list does not say which do, so anyone who wants one should ask for it by name when booking rather than assume it comes with a category.
Mido Paris is the hotel's restaurant, and its cooking is Nikkei, the meeting of Japanese and Peruvian kitchens. The room is planted like a conservatory, with green velvet chairs, rattan lanterns and daylight from above, which makes it the brightest public space in a house of fifty-five rooms. For a resident it doubles as the hotel's living room, a place to sit that does not feel like a lobby, at lunch as much as in the evening.
The hotel occupies three historic buildings on avenue Marceau gathered around a courtyard, and the street front shows only one of them: carved stone, wrought-iron balconies and a flag over the door. The entrance gives little away about the house behind it, which suits it. Fifty-five rooms on five floors make it closer in scale to a townhouse hotel than to the international brand on the sign, and the arrival feels like stepping into a private building.
The reception is where the later renovation speaks loudest: a cloud of gilded leaves across the ceiling, a marbled floor and a curved desk in bronze tones. It is the one room in the house that uses the international brand's language outright. Beyond it the hotel returns to the scale of its buildings, with corridors and bedrooms rather than a grand lobby, so the spectacle lasts a few steps before the house becomes domestic again.
At a glance
Where
64 avenue Marceau, 75008 Paris, in the Golden Triangle; the Champs-Élysées about five minutes on foot, the Arc de Triomphe a few steps further
Why this one
Venetian-style ceilings above contemporary rooms.
Three old buildings turned inward.
Nikkei cooking beneath a glass roof.
The Edit Notes
When the hotel opened as an InterContinental in December 2009, its interiors were credited to Bruno Borrione, and the Venetian Renaissance frescoes were part of that scheme. Today's rooms are by Alexandre Danan. The furniture has changed hands; the painted ceilings have not. That makes the frescoes the house's one true constant, and the feature to look for when a room is offered: everything else has proved replaceable.
The courtyard-side conservatory has been the hotel's dining room since 2009, first as Le M64 and now as Mido Paris, a restaurant with its own name, its own website and its own bookings. For a small hotel that is a sensible division of labour: the kitchen is run as a restaurant first, not as room service with tables. The cost is that its identity is set by the restaurant rather than the house, and its rhythm follows Paris diners rather than residents.
The official room descriptions set up a genuine choice. Cosy rooms, the smallest at 15 m², face the courtyard; Premium rooms, at 23 m², come with a large window onto the city. Paying for space therefore also turns the room towards the street side of an address just off the Champs-Élysées. For a stay built around the house rather than the city, the courtyard side is the more coherent choice, provided fifteen square metres is acceptable.
One restaurant, a fitness room, meeting rooms, no spa: at fifty-five rooms the hotel's most substantial service is human, a Clefs d'Or concierge desk. It carries the weight that larger houses spread across spa menus, lounges and arcades of shops. That is the right trade for a city stay spent mostly outside the building, and the wrong one for days planned around staying in. Judge the hotel by what the desk can arrange, not by what the building contains.
The price question
The money buys a small, well-placed house with painted ceilings, a courtyard and a glass-roofed restaurant, under a brand that sells reassurance. It does not buy space at the entry level, a pool or spa, or the public-room life of a large hotel. Spending on a Premium room or a suite changes the stay far more than paying for the name above the door.
Book it for a short, outward-looking city stay in a Premium room or a suite. Look elsewhere for a long stay in, a pool, or a large hotel's public life.
InterContinental Paris Le Grand
IHG's other InterContinental in Paris, at 2 rue Scribe opposite the Opéra Garnier.
Hôtel Raphael
A 1925 hotel of 83 rooms at 17 avenue Kléber in the 16th, owned by Les Hôtels Baverez.
The Extra Edit
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How the grade is made
The Edit score is the editor's grade for the level of the hotel, out of ten. It weighs what the outside judges say (Michelin Keys, Forbes Travel Guide, World's 50 Best Hotels, Atout France palace status, La Liste), what changed in the last two years and what guests write now; where these and the editor's own judgement disagree, the editor decides. A spa with a pool worth booking for adds up to two tenths.
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