The Peninsula Paris

In every room at The Peninsula Paris there is a small cupboard with two doors. One opens into the dressing room, the other onto the corridor. Put your shoes in it at night and they come back polished, and nobody has knocked. It is a modest thing, and it explains the hotel better than all its marble.

The idea comes from Hong Kong, where the first Peninsula opened in 1928; Paris, in 2014, was the group's first hotel in Europe. Most of the city's great hotels sell Paris itself: its manners, its legends, its sense of occasion. The Peninsula sells a Hong Kong notion of hospitality, in which the finest compliment is to take care of things before anyone has to ask. Arrange it in advance and your room is yours from six in the morning after a night flight, and until ten at night before a late one. Page boys and girls in white hold the doors, the hotel's cars wait outside, and children are made a particular fuss of. The warmth is quieter than at Le Bristol. It shows less in conversation than in the feeling that someone has already thought of it.

The house the Peninsula found in Paris had nearly forgotten it was a hotel. It opened in 1908 as the Majestic, on the avenue Kléber, and in the 1930s the French state bought it. For most of the century that followed it was a building where governments did business: the German military command during the Occupation, UNESCO's first headquarters after the war, the conference centre where the peace accords on Vietnam were signed in 1973. The Peninsula spent four years with French stonemasons, plasterers and gilders bringing back the Belle Époque rooms. They look much as they must have in 1908, only newer. This is a palace without patina, and that is part of its calm.

That calm is what a stay here is mostly about. Inside, Paris is kept at a polite distance. Downstairs there is a Cantonese restaurant, tea in the lobby, and a long pool deep below the street, without daylight. The rooms are more generous than the Paris average, look onto the avenue or onto quiet courtyards, and are built so that very little needs explaining. Only on the roof does the city come in at full strength: the restaurant up there, L'Oiseau Blanc, has the Eiffel Tower in its windows and a model of the lost biplane it is named after.

The same qualities set its limits. The hotel stands in the 16th arrondissement, a few minutes' walk from the Arc de Triomphe, among avenues that are calm rather than lively, and an evening stroll here has less to offer than one on the Left Bank. Anyone who wants Paris to seep into the hotel, with a bar full of regulars and a little disorder in the salons, will find it more composed than they hoped. It suits long-haul travellers, families, and anyone who finds Paris tiring and would like the hotel to take care of the tiring parts.

For most of the last century, delegations came to this building to work out their differences. Its guests now come for the opposite: a few days in Paris in which nothing, not even the hour of arrival, has to be negotiated.