Ritz Paris

In April 2018 the Ritz sold itself by the piece. Over five days a Paris auction house took bids on some ten thousand objects that had not gone back into the hotel after its renovation: bed frames and sofas, the stools from the Hemingway bar, slippers stitched with the hotel's name, a bathtub from the year it opened. The sale raised more than seven million euros. For the price of a lot, anyone could take a piece of the Ritz home.

Day to day, the hotel still works that way. A seat at the Bar Hemingway costs a drink and some patience: twenty-five places, no reservations, for whoever arrives first. The Ritz Bar takes no bookings either, and a room upstairs moves no one up the queue. Tea in the Salon Proust, lunch under the glass roof of the Bar Vendôme, madeleines from the pastry counter on the rue Cambon: each can be had by someone sleeping across town. Even the pool under its painted sky is shared with members of the hotel's club and with anyone who buys a day pass.

What the Ritz does not sell by the piece is the night. Once the bars close, around midnight, the hotel is left to the people staying in it. Room service runs around the clock, and the gym, which day guests must leave at ten, stays open to residents all night. The rooms are where the building's oldest ideas survive. César Ritz experimented with lampshade colours for what they did to a woman's skin; in the bedrooms today the shades are lined in apricot-pink silk, the bath linen is peach, and a bell for the valet and the maid hangs above the bath. No visitor sees any of it.

That makes the room the whole purchase, and it varies more than its name suggests. The 35-square-metre Superior has a reading corner and a writing corner, and little floor for two people dressing for a hotel with a dress code. The Grand Deluxe, at 55, is the first category whose bedroom opens onto a sitting room. The square cannot be booked below a handful of suites: Place Vendôme is a stated view for only eight of them, and ordinary rooms may face the square, a courtyard, a street or the garden without any of them being sold on its view.

So the test before paying is simple. If the Ritz you want is a drink at five, tea in the afternoon and a look at the pool, buy them separately and sleep somewhere cheaper; a room would not get you a better seat. If what you want is the night, with supper sent up after the bars have closed, a long bath under the bell and the room lit through silk, book the Grand Deluxe or larger, and ask what the window faces before you pay.