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100 rooms and suites
/550 m² of historic salons on the first floor
/17 metre pool
The viewby name.
Among the plants that Prince Roland Bonaparte kept is a tuft of grass collected on the Champs-Élysées in 1918, from the spade of a 77 cannon. Another sheet holds orchids taken from a Christmas basket on 30 December 1900. Bonaparte, a grandnephew of the emperor, labelled everything, and by his death in 1924 his herbarium held between two and a half and three million specimens, said to be the largest ever assembled by a private person. The binders stood upright like books and were indexed on 144,000 cards. The house on the avenue d'Iéna that is now the Shangri-La was where he kept it.
The money came from an unlikely source. Bonaparte's wife, who died young, was the daughter of the man who founded the casino at Monte Carlo, and her fortune paid for the house that Ernest Janty finished in 1896. So the roulette tables of Monaco built a palace of science. Its library ran to as many as two hundred thousand volumes, so many that after the prince's death it stayed put until 1942, too large to move. The herbarium left for Lyon in twenty-two railway wagons.
Then the house spent some eighty years as offices. It was sold to the Suez Canal Company, and the French state later used it as its office for foreign trade. When Shangri-La bought it, the Hong Kong group asked for the building to be listed, and the protection order names the rooms one by one, from the billiard room and the smoking room to the blue salon and the prince's own salon. Restoring them took four years, as long as the house had taken to build, and during the work a glass-and-steel roof turned up above a false ceiling. The hotel opened in December 2010.
The prince's plants have a less orderly afterlife at Le Bar Botaniste, where cocktails borrow from rose, fig and sumac rather than dried specimens. The garden was planted in his honour, there is a beehive on the roof, and the spa pool lies in his former stables. Across the street stands the Musée Guimet, France's museum of Asian art, which makes a reasonable neighbour for a hotel company from Hong Kong.
The listed rooms are now at work as well. Since early 2026 the salons of the prince have served as an all-day restaurant, with a piano and the old fireplaces, among bees, crowns and the initials RB worked into the decoration around the candelabra. A cup of tea there is the easiest way to see how a scientist with a casino fortune lived.
The famous view is not universal. Fewer than half the rooms face the Eiffel Tower; the others look out over the city. The sixteenth arrondissement is a quarter of embassies, apartment buildings and museums, more dignified than lively after dark, and the walk to the cafés of Saint-Germain is a long one.
Roland Bonaparte catalogued nearly three million plants, but he did not claim the best-known object on the Paris skyline for himself. His daughter Marie had the Eiffel Tower outside her window. The prince chose the rooms facing avenue d'Iéna. His apartment still looks that way.
6.85 metres
The ceiling height of the prince's Grand Salon.
The prince's rooms, open for tea
Les Salons du Prince is where the listed house becomes usable without a booking for a banquet: a restaurant on the lobby level that runs from late morning into the evening, serving lunch, tea and dinner to residents and to Parisians who come in from the avenue. It opened fully in March 2026, after a few weeks of soft opening. The menu leans on caviar and French classics, and the afternoon tea is the work of pastry chef Timothy Lam, which makes tea the obvious first visit.
A Terrace Eiffel View Room
The Terrace Eiffel View Room, 55 m², is the category in which the tower stops being framed by a window and becomes part of the room's outdoor space: a private, furnished terrace faces it, with an oversized bedroom, a walk-in closet and a marble bathroom with a separate deep tub behind. Only the named Eiffel categories have this outlook. The hotel's own pages warn that photographs show the category, not the individual room, so the floor and angle vary within it.
A tent for the evening
Le Bar Botaniste is the hotel's evening room, designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon as a homage to the campaign tents of the Napoleonic era rather than to a laboratory. The cocktail list reads like a seed catalogue: pandan and black pepper in one glass, lemon balm and jalapeño in another, quince, sage and olive elsewhere. It is small and set apart from the lobby, a place for a nightcap after dinner rather than a meeting point.
Europe's first Shang Palace
The group's Chinese restaurant opened here in 2011, the first Shang Palace in Europe, and it is the room where the hotel's Asian ownership is most visible. Chef Tony Xu leads a kitchen of haute Chinese cooking, with a separate dim sum menu. Besides the main dining room there are two private rooms, Tang for twelve and Qing Ming for twenty-four. The tea service follows the Gong Fu Cha ceremony from a bespoke cart, with an aged Pu-erh cake at its centre.
At a glance
Where
10 avenue d'Iéna, 75116 Paris, on the place d'Iéna opposite the Musée Guimet, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower; about 45 minutes by road from Charles de Gaulle and 30 from Orly
The house
Built 1892-1896 by Ernest Janty for Prince Roland Bonaparte; inscribed as a Monument historique on 10 February 2009 (facades, roofs, street railing, grand staircase and decorated rooms on three floors); Shangri-La's first hotel in Europe, opened 17 December 2010 with 81 rooms; interiors by Pierre-Yves Rochon
Rooms facing the city
Superior Room 36 m², courtyard or glass cupola; Deluxe Room 40 m², garden or avenues; Terrace Room 45 m², private terrace over the garden or avenues; Junior Suite 55 m² and Deluxe Suite 60 m², courtyard, avenue d'Iéna or rue Fresnel; Connecting Family Junior Suite 99 m², avenue d'Iéna; L'Appartement Prince Bonaparte 315 m², balconies over the avenue d'Iéna and the Musée Guimet
Rooms facing the tower
Eiffel View Room 45 m², French windows; Paris Panoramic Signature Room 54 m² and Terrace Eiffel View Room 55 m², furnished terrace; Duplex Eiffel View Suite 80 m², two-storey windows; Duplex Terrace Eiffel View Suite 70 m²; La Suite Gustave Eiffel 70 m², wraparound terrace; Connecting Family Eiffel View Suite 97 m²; La Suite Chaillot 110 m²; La Suite Shangri-La 120 m². Partial view: Junior Suite Paris View 55 m², Terrace Suite with Paris View 70 m²
Eating and drinking
Les Salons du Prince, all-day restaurant since March 2026, pastry by Timothy Lam; Maison Roland, bistro opening onto the garden since May 2026; Shang Palace, Chinese, chef Tony Xu, with two private rooms; Le Bar Botaniste, designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon; first-floor historic salons and the Salon Roland Bonaparte let for events
Wellbeing
Chi, The Spa: 17-metre pool in natural light with a terrace, steam room, health club overlooking the pool, treatment rooms; spa club membership; under-18s not admitted to the spa; pets up to 10 kg welcome, not in the spa
Why this one
01
The tower, by category.
Terraces facing it from 54 m².
02
A listed house at work.
Tea and dinner in the prince's salons.
03
A daylit pool.
Seventeen metres, with its own terrace.
The Edit Notes
What a booking site will not tell you.
01
Read the room name, not the picture.
The hotel sells the tower by category, and the names are precise. Superior Rooms face the courtyard or the glass cupola; Deluxe and Terrace Rooms the garden or the avenues; Junior and Deluxe Suites the courtyard, the avenue d'Iéna or rue Fresnel. 'Paris View' means the garden and a partial tower. A straight view begins with the Eiffel View Room, 45 m², and a terrace facing it with the Paris Panoramic Signature Room, 54 m². If the tower is the point, the word 'Eiffel' has to be in the booking.
02
Half the listed house is a ballroom.
The listing of 2009 protects rooms on three floors, but they do not all serve the same purpose. On the first floor, the Grand Salon, the Salon de Famille and the Salle à Manger, 550 m² with their foyer, are let for banquets and receptions. Dinner and tea happen on the lobby level, in Les Salons du Prince and at Maison Roland, which take outside bookings. A resident sees the grand sequence only by staircase, or on a night when nobody has hired it.
03
The pool is shared, and closed to children.
The 17-metre pool is lit by daylight and has its own terrace, with the health club looking down on it. It is not reserved for residents: members of the spa club have it from the same early hour, and non-residents are admitted later in the day. The rule that matters more runs the other way. The spa does not admit anyone under eighteen, so the connecting family suites the hotel sells come with a pool the children should not count on.
04
A museum quarter that closes at night.
Within a short walk of the door are the Musée Guimet across the place d'Iéna, the Palais de Tokyo and the city's Musée d'Art Moderne on the avenue du Président-Wilson, and the Palais de Chaillot at the Trocadéro, with the Pont d'Iéna leading over to the tower. That makes the 16th a strong daytime base for museums. After closing time the streets belong to residents and embassies, and the evening is either the hotel's own bar and restaurants or a metro ride from Iéna.
The price question
The money buys a listed house on the right bank, a quiet street and, in the named Eiffel categories, the tower across the river. The salons, the bar and the garden bistro are the same for every key, and partly open to anyone with a reservation. Below the Eiffel categories, the room pays for the address and the house, not the view. Choose the category before the date.
What the money buys
The Eiffel Tower, in the categories that carry its name.
A furnished terrace facing the tower from 54 m².
A daylit 17-metre pool and a listed house to come home to.
What it leaves out
The tower in the courtyard, garden and avenue rooms.
A spa for anyone under eighteen.
Evening life outside the door.
Who it suits
Book it for a few days of museums on the right bank and a room whose name includes the tower. Look elsewhere for Left Bank evenings, or for a family holiday built around a pool.
Who should spend elsewhere
The Peninsula Paris
At 19 avenue Kléber, near the Étoile: 200 rooms including 93 suites in a heritage building renovated in 2014, a 20-metre indoor pool and L'Oiseau Blanc, a rooftop restaurant facing the city's monuments.
Hôtel Plaza Athénée
At 25 avenue Montaigne since 1913: most categories face inner courtyards or the avenue, and the official room list names an Eiffel Tower view for the balcony of the Deluxe Suite, Avenue Montaigne View with Balcony.
The Extra Edit
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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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