Mandarin Oriental Lutetia

The Lutetia began as an extension of a department store. In 1910, the people behind Le Bon Marché opened a grand hotel across the square for customers who had travelled to Paris to shop. They could spend the day buying what they liked and return to somewhere suitably splendid for the night. A century later, the store is still there, but the hotel has acquired a wider role. People from the neighbourhood come in for lunch, for a drink, or simply to meet somebody. The Left Bank has made it its front room.

It has also given the building an extraordinary history. Artists and writers made it one of their Paris addresses, but its most important chapter came in 1945. After years of German occupation, the hotel became a reception centre for deportees returning from the concentration camps. Families gathered here hoping to find loved ones among the survivors. A plaque outside remembers those days. Few hotels carry a history quite like it, and the Lutetia has never been merely a place for visitors to sleep.

What you find today is a grand hotel with Left Bank manners. A four-year restoration, completed in 2018, brought light back into its great public rooms. In Bar Joséphine, conservators uncovered beautiful painted scenes beneath layers of old paint, and now you can sit beneath them with a cocktail while musicians play on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. The Brasserie Lutetia, on the corner of boulevard Raspail, serves French classics to a mixture of hotel guests and Parisians who have no intention of going upstairs. There is also the Saint-Germain salon, beneath a painted glass roof, for coffee, afternoon tea or a long lunch. The hotel is grand, but it is unusually easy to make yourself comfortable in its public rooms.

Upstairs, the 184 rooms and suites are more restrained, with oak floors, fine woodwork and marble bathrooms. Choosing the right outlook matters. The Grand Superior rooms, at 33 square metres, face the quiet inner courtyard and make a very comfortable base. If you like looking out over Paris, the 40-square-metre Deluxe Balcony rooms offer views of Saint-Germain from their private balconies. For an Eiffel Tower view, there is a separate category on the upper floors. It is worth deciding which of these pleasures matters most to you before booking. Downstairs, the spa has a seventeen-metre indoor pool, a rather welcome luxury after a day on your feet.

And this is a wonderful part of Paris to explore on foot. Le Bon Marché and its excellent food hall are just across the square, Saint-Germain's bookshops and cafés are a few minutes away, and the Luxembourg Gardens make an easy morning walk. You can spend the day in the neighbourhood without once crossing the Seine, and come back for a drink at Joséphine before dinner. Since 2025, the hotel has been managed by Mandarin Oriental, but the pleasures of the address remain distinctly Parisian.

There are compromises. The Lutetia is a large, expensive palace, not an intimate neighbourhood hotel. Boulevard Raspail carries plenty of traffic, and anyone hoping to spend most of their time around the Champs-Élysées or the fashionable hotels of the Golden Triangle will be happier on the other side of the river. It suits returning visitors, lovers of Saint-Germain and travellers who enjoy a great hotel that is also part of the life of its neighbourhood.

You can come here for the rooms, the pool and the service. But it is rather nice to stay in a hotel where the bar and brasserie would still be worth visiting even if you were sleeping somewhere else.