InterContinental Paris Le Grand

One night in October 1869, a young reporter called Henry Morton Stanley knocked on a door at the Grand Hôtel in Paris. His editor, James Gordon Bennett, had summoned him from Madrid and was waiting in bed. By the end of their conversation Stanley had been given an extraordinary assignment: find the missing explorer David Livingstone, somewhere in Africa. Two years later, he did.

Le Grand was only seven years old then, built on a scale that suited the Paris Napoleon III was creating. When Empress Eugénie opened it in 1862, its 800 rooms filled an entire block and the Opéra across the square was still thirteen years from completion. On the ground floor, the Café de la Paix opened with the hotel, and Paris has been coming in ever since. You can still take a table on its terrace, order coffee or a long lunch, and watch the traffic, the theatre crowds and the life of the square go by.

Inside, the hotel offers another kind of pleasure. Beyond the busy entrance is La Verrière, an enormous winter garden beneath a roof of iron and glass, with palm trees, deep armchairs and daylight falling through the dome. People come here for coffee, meetings and afternoon tea; after a performance across the square, they come back for a drink. For a hotel of this size, it has a surprisingly agreeable place to sit and do very little. The Café de la Paix belongs to the street outside. La Verrière makes you glad to have come indoors.

Upstairs, there are 458 rooms, and choosing the right one makes a considerable difference. The recent renovation has given them fresh interiors without losing their Second Empire character, but the smallest Cosy Rooms can measure just seventeen square metres. They are fine for a short visit when you plan to be out all day. For several nights, a Premium Room, averaging thirty-four square metres, is a more comfortable place to live. If you want the Opéra outside your window, book that view specifically. The Premium Opera View rooms have balconies facing the Palais Garnier; an ordinary Premium Room makes no such promise. At present, restoration work on the Opéra may affect what you see, so it is worth checking before paying extra.

The great advantage of Le Grand is how easily you can make a day of Paris from here. The Opéra is across the square, Galeries Lafayette and Printemps are a short walk behind the hotel, and the Louvre and the Tuileries are close enough to reach on foot. You can spend a morning in a museum, an afternoon shopping and an evening at the theatre without much planning between them. And when you come back, there is a choice: the café facing the street, a sofa under the glass roof, or simply upstairs to your room. Guests who prefer more privacy can also book access to the smaller Club Lounge, above La Verrière.

The price of such a useful address is that it is busy. This is a large international hotel, with conferences, tour groups and hundreds of other guests, not an intimate Paris house where everyone knows your name. The neighbourhood is grand and convenient, but its traffic and department stores offer little of the village life people love in Saint-Germain or the Marais. There is a spa but no pool. Le Grand suits first-time visitors, opera lovers, families and travellers with a full programme, particularly those who enjoy the atmosphere of a grand old hotel without needing it to feel exclusive.

You might spend most of your stay somewhere else in Paris, and that is part of the pleasure. When the evening is over, the Café de la Paix is still there, the Opéra is across the square, and your room is only a few floors away.