Luxury hotel’s £389m facelift launches war of the Paris palaces
PARIS is facing a “war of palaces” after the relaunch of the Hôtel de Crillon, a crown jewel in the French capital’s group of historic luxury hotels and amid a rising tide of chic newcomers.
The return of the Crillon, overlooking the Place de la Concorde and Tuileries Garden, follows a four-year overhaul said to have cost its owner, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, up to €440million (£389million). He bought the property in 2010 for a reported €250million.
The comeback follows the renaissance last June of the Ritz Paris after a three-year, €400million facelift, and just days before another top-class hotel, the Fouquet’s Barrière on the Champs-Élysées, reopens.
The Crillon, where Marie-Antoinette once had music lessons and whose guests have ranged from Sir Winston Churchill to Madonna, is expected to swiftly obtain “palace” status, bringing the number of such top-class hotels that go beyond five stars to 14 in the French capital in the coming months. The number has doubled in a decade, meaning that Paris now offers almost 2,000 suites at €1,000 (£883) a night on average.
Le Crillon, whose novelties include a swimming pool with 17,600 fish-scale mosaic tesserae lining the basin, is among the most exclusive, with rooms starting at €1,200 (£1,000) and rising to €32,000 (£28,000) per night for one of two “Grands Appartements” decorated by Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s iconic creative director.
The timing is serendipitous, as after a drop in the luxury market in the wake of the 2015 terror attacks – where occupancy fell to as low as 20 per cent – business is finally picking up, if not quite to pre-2015 levels. June was a bumper month and July is also looking rosy. But with more palaces in the pipeline, can the City of Lights really accommodate so much lustre?
François Delahaye, the general director of the Plaza Athénée, is not so sure. “It raises the number of palace category rooms,” he said. “There are rather too many palaces in Paris.”
Launched in 2011 by the French government, the “palace” label is awarded to hotels with bigger rooms than fivestar properties, more facilities, and higher service standards. A jury of experts also considers a series of other factors, from aesthetics and environment to the contribution to “enhancing the image of France throughout the world”.
The first list was a blow to historic self-appointed “palaces”, as it omitted the Ritz Paris, the Crillon and the Four Seasons Hotel George V, and promoted in their place the Park Hyatt ParisVendôme, less than a decade old. The George V was swiftly brought into the fold, but the Ritz and Crillon embarked on pharaonic renovation works. They also had to contend with a raft of new entrants in Paris’s luxury hotel market in the 2000s, starting with the Park Hyatt and followed by Asian giants Shangri-La, Raffles and Mandarin Oriental Paris. Then in 2015 the Peninsula off the Champs-Élysées opened and is said to have cost €850 million.
More are to follow: the Lutetia will open its doors in 2018 at Opera and the Cheval Blanc of Gallic luxury tycoon Bernard Arnaud – the only French owner – will launch on the Left Bank the following year.
“[The Crillon’s] arrival risks pushing less well-placed Parisian palaces, in terms of location, quality of service and fittings, to consent to a drop in rates,” said Gabriel Matar of Serenity Hospitality.
He described the plethora of new offers as a “war of prestige egos” that he believed would nevertheless be beneficial to Paris’s overall status as “the capital of palaces”. But others queried whether such mastodontes were what today’s moneyed travellers were really after.
“There will always be room for the classics like the Ritz or the Crillon but is this ageing palace clientele infinitely extendable?” asked JeanFrançois Demorge, whose Cabinet Huchet Demorge helps investors buy hotels. He predicted that newcomers like the Peninsula would suffer – notably because he felt it didn’t have a long-cherished reputation or plum enough location.
“Many customers who have money are prepared to spend it looking for trendy or chic hotels,” he said.
Beyond “palaces”, the number of four to five-star hotels is rocketing in central Paris, the world’s most visited capital, as big businesses free up office space to move to cheaper areas.
“Today, there are 110 four or five-star hotel projects under construction,” according to Philippe Vaurs, a pioneer in Parisian boutique hotels, who said the industry had shown incredible resilience, despite terror attacks and effectively a doubling of the city’s hotel capacity with the rise of Airbnb.
But the top bracket of the luxury market remains volatile, according to Christian Mantai, the general director of Atout France, the French tourist development body that awards “palace” status. “The stock of rooms and suites has become very high in Paris. Tourist demand is on the rise again, but the climate remains very uncertain,” he told Le Monde.
“Four or five-star Parisian hotels have started looking rosier in recent months. It’s still tough for the palaces, which are having trouble selling their suites,” he confessed.