Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris

The cinema at Le Royal Monceau has ninety-nine seats, all of them grey except one, which is red. It is there, the hotel says, to make people ask why. The walls around it are lined with small white ceramic eyes. It is a fair introduction to everything upstairs: a hotel that would rather set its guests a question than answer one they never asked.

It started with hammers. In June 2008, before the old hotel of 1928 was gutted, its new owners threw a demolition party. Well over a thousand invited guests arrived in white overalls, rubber boots and orange helmets, and each was handed a hammer. One reporter needed more than five minutes to knock a hole the size of a fist between rooms 427 and 429. Twenty-two artists took over a room each on the first floor; in one of them, a hammer struck a wine glass all evening and never broke it. The furniture was auctioned off that same month, although Philippe Starck kept the Baccarat chandeliers, which now hang in a cluster above the staircase.

Starck's starting point for the new hotel was a complaint. A hotel room, he said, is empty, terribly empty, and it takes days to fill. So he did some of the filling himself. Framed pictures lean against the walls as though waiting to be hung. Every room has an acoustic guitar, every desk a map of Paris annotated in his hand, and old photographs hide behind the bathroom mirrors. He said he hoped guests would leave something of their own behind: a poem, a drawing, a love note.

The questions this raises are handled by staff with unusual job descriptions. The hotel appointed what it calls the first Art Concierge in Paris, and Julie Eugène has held the post since 2010. She got there by helping a street artist install his work at the demolition party. Her job is to open doors in the art world for guests, and the hotel gives her plenty to work with: an art bookshop, a collection of more than three hundred works, a herd of wooden deer by Nikolay Polissky on a first-floor landing and a giant teapot by Joana Vasconcelos in the garden.

The cinema is the room to use. It retains 35 mm projection, and since August 2026 it has opened to the public one Sunday a month, so the red seat may well be taken by somebody from the neighbourhood. The restaurants keep up the game. Il Carpaccio is reached along a corridor lined with mother-of-pearl shells, Matsuhisa sits behind a wall built from sake bottles, and a twenty-three-metre pool gives the evening something calmer to end on.

The wit dates from 2010, and a few of its jokes have now been told for a while. Rooms full of frames, books and instruments suit a guest who likes to be entertained more than one who wants a blank page. The hotel stands on a smart, quiet avenue near the Étoile, not on the river, and the walk to the Seine takes about twenty minutes.

The old hotel was handed over to guests with hammers. Its replacement needs only one red seat to make an otherwise orderly room feel slightly unfinished.