7.9Rue La Pérouse, Paris
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From the front door of the Majestic, the grandest building in sight is the Majestic. Across rue La Pérouse stands the palace that once wore the name. It opened in 1908, built by Léonard Tauber, whose associate Constant Baverez would go on to run the hotel business. In 1936 the company sold the great building to the French state but kept the name and the smaller buildings across the street. Today the palace is the Peninsula. The Majestic, still run by Baverez's descendants, is the house looking back at it. Paris has many grand hotels; few have survived their own departure quite so neatly.
On an English country estate, the dower house was where the widow might move when the next generation took over the great house. It was not quite exile, more a change of scale. One address was for showing the family fortune to the world; the other was for getting on with life. Nobody sent a dowager across rue La Pérouse. Still, the comparison is hard to resist. Across the road is a palace built to impress. Here is a house with much less interest in an audience.
The Majestic in its present form dates from 2010, and more than half its rooms and suites have a kitchen. That sounds like an unromantic detail until you imagine using one. There is a market on avenue du Président-Wilson, a walk away. You can bring back vegetables, put something in the fridge and decide that Paris has had enough of you for one day. A hotel behaves differently when dinner can be whatever you put on your own table. It is less like borrowing a room and more like borrowing an address.
And the address is well chosen. The Arc de Triomphe draws crowds a few streets away, but rue La Pérouse has the useful quiet of a place people return to rather than pass through. Carrying a bag of shopping through the 16th, you could almost pass for a neighbour. For once, the best part of a grand Paris hotel might be the feeling of having an ordinary errand to run.
Not everything here is modest. Beneath this supposedly little house is a swimming pool, an extravagance few Parisian households keep in the basement. Even a family used to running palaces, it seems, has its own idea of downsizing. Upstairs, the rooms are more concerned with comfort than ceremony. The entrance has none of the swagger of the building opposite. A dower house can keep the silver without insisting on the ballroom.
The great house is where you go to be impressed. The smaller one is where you can stay long enough to feel at home. And on rue La Pérouse, it is still the smaller house that has the old name over the door.
The old name
When the great building opposite was sold, the family kept the name Majestic for itself.
The building opposite takes its address from avenue Kléber, number 19, where the original Majestic was raised on the site of the Palais de Castille. The Majestic today answers to a side street. That is the whole difference in a line: one hotel was placed to be found from the avenue, the other to be reached by those who already know the way. The door opens on a street the house itself describes as free of noisy traffic, about 400 metres from the Arc de Triomphe.
The Junior Suite Deluxe has the same 55 m² as the plain Junior Suite. What changes is the kitchenette, and the option of a door rather than only curtains between living room and bed. Those two details turn a large room into a small flat: one person can heat milk while another sleeps. The hotel itself calls this category a small Parisian apartment, and it is the most compact of the suites in which that description holds.
The Majestic Suite shows the house at its most domestic rather than its most grand: a sitting room with gilded chairs and striped curtains, and through an arch a table for meals at home. Like the other suites, it has outdoor space of its own, which no ordinary room in the house offers. The point of a suite here is not a larger stage for entertaining but more room in which to live for a while, with the city a short walk away.
The pool measures 14 metres by 5, heated to 29°C, and sits inside a 450 m² wellness area with two hammams and a sauna. Its useful secret is a counter-current: a swimmer can hold position against the flow and keep going without turning at the wall. A short city basin becomes a pool for real exercise. For a guest it is the one room in the house that serves the body before the eye.
At a glance
Where
30 rue La Pérouse, 16th arrondissement; about 400 metres from the Arc de Triomphe and 1.6 km from the Eiffel Tower
Why this one
In a large share of rooms and suites.
Fourteen metres, heated, with a counter-current.
Still run by Constant Baverez's descendants.
The Edit Notes
The kitchen begins in the Grand Deluxe Room, 35 m². The larger Premium Room, 43 m², has none, and neither do the Classic and Superior rooms. Anyone who wants to cook should choose by equipment, not by floor area. Even then, expect a hob, a fridge, a microwave and a kettle: only the Eiffel Tower Terrace Suite and the Majestic Suite are listed with a fully equipped kitchen. This is a kitchen for breakfast and simple suppers, not for entertaining.
Private terraces are sold with the suites, not the rooms. The Terrace Suite, on the fifth floor, has 25 m² outside; the Eiffel Tower Terrace Suite has 35 m² facing the tower; the Majestic Suite has two terraces, of 33 and 42 m². In a city where a balcony is rare, a terrace changes a stay more than extra floor space indoors. The Terrace Suite is the most modest way to have one.
In 2010 the house opened as the Villa Hôtel Majestic, and its launch material presented the units with kitchenettes as a category of their own, villa accommodation, beside conventional rooms and suites. Self-catering was the founding idea, not a later amenity. The name has since become Majestic Hôtel-Spa, and the emphasis has moved downstairs. The kitchens remain, but the house now introduces itself through its wellness floor rather than its apartments.
The pool, hammams and fitness room double as the MajClub, a membership club with its own changing rooms and valet service. Residents therefore share the basement with people who sleep elsewhere. That fits a house that behaves like part of the neighbourhood, but it also means the wellness floor is not a private enclave. Anyone wanting the pool to themselves should not assume it will be empty.
The price question
The Majestic asks a top-end price for a house that deliberately does less than the grand hotel across the road: no grand public rooms, no ceremonial dining. What the money buys is space, a kitchen in a large share of rooms, a quiet street close to the Étoile and a genuinely usable pool. Choose a room with a kitchenette or a terrace suite and the value is clear; book a Classic room and much of the point is lost.
Book it for a longer stay, for a family or for anyone who would rather cook breakfast than dress for it, in a room with a kitchenette or a terrace suite. Look elsewhere for ceremony.
Raphael
The same family's house at 17 avenue Kléber, built in 1925, with a rooftop; under renovation, with a return announced for 2027.
La Réserve Paris
On avenue Gabriel in the 8th, with a 16-metre indoor pool and separate apartments of 140 to 300 m² on place du Trocadéro.
The Extra Edit
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Ask for a stay and a person takes it from there. Any hotel privileges that apply, and a personal Extra arranged by us, are confirmed with your bookable quote.
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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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