THE PENINSULA PARIS
19, avenue Kléber, Paris, peninsula.com; 200 rooms (including 45 suites) from €795 ($1,120).
Pity those suffering luxury hotels in Paris: Given the hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations going on, you’d think that each one of them is an outsized salon de refusé. The Ritz, Le Bristol and Le Crillon are just a few gilded destinations that have recently gone in for a heavy polish. And now they have to compete with the city’s new billion-dollar baby, the Peninsula.
Located in the 16th arrondissement, this restored Haussmanian building is an exercise in restrained decadence from the moment you walk in: from the BMW that picked you up at the airport (and the hotel-assigned greeters that whisk every one of their guests through customs).
The reception area boasts hundreds of hand-blown crystal “dancing leaves.” In other foliage-related matters, there are also 20,000 pieces of gold leaf applied to nooks, crevices and ceilings across the public areas. Aimed at the booming class of Chinese globetrotters, the Peninsula (a joint-venture between the eponymous Hong Kong-based company and Qatar-based Katara Hospitality) is imbued with a Franco-Sino theme that reaches its apex at Lili, its Cantonese restaurant, where traditional panels are inspired by French-Chinese dictionaries.
Like many grand dames in the City of Light, the Peninsula has a rich (and slightly dark) history. Once known as the Majestic, this century-old property is where George Gershwin wrote An American in Paris and was a haunt for Picasso, Joyce and Proust. During the Second World War, the Germans took over the building as the headquarters for its military command. In what is now the venerable, oak-panelled Kléber Bar, Henry Kissinger signed the 1973 Paris Peace Accords between the United States and Vietnam.
When it soft-launched last summer, the Peninsula didn’t seem like a threatening upstart. There were bracing barbs on TripAdvisor about everything from cold tea to the hauteur of service. (“We were shredded to pieces,” said hotel director Nicolas Béliard.) As a result, management hired more than 100 staffers to meet the unexpected surge in interest. The reviews are improving, so yes, it will cause trouble after all.
LOCATION, LOCATION
Around the corner from the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe and a five-minute cab ride from the new building that Frank Gehry designed for the Fondation Louis Vuitton. For the Amex Platinum-wielding guests who don’t want to take a 10- to 15-minute drive to the city centre, there is the very twee Avenue Montaigne.
DESIGN
The hotel’s 200 rooms don’t skimp on space: 375 square feet is the entry-level area. Also unstinting on state-of-the-art luxury, the marble bathtubs have TVs, the dressing rooms have both a nail dryer and a valet box that acts like a dumbwaiter: you can put just about anything on it that needs to be fixed, sewn or polished, and a mysterious handy-person shoots it back up. One misgiving about the room decor: if only the sense of whimsical decadence from the lobby was applied to the room’s bland, haute-Sino decor. It’s predictable.
EAT IN OR OUT
The non-kitschy, aviation-themed L’Oiseau Blanc is a rooftop restaurant that offers a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower and a Parisian panorama. The place is a rare bird indeed: It’s hard to find a place where the food is as stunning as the view, and this restaurant is a double threat.
BEST AMENITY
The rooms are serenely quiet. A velvet sarcophagus. No street noise. Impermeable night shades controlled from an iPad. No burbling air conditioners or fans that sputter like an old, two-cylinder Citroën in the early dawn. On our first morning, my wife and I slept until noon by mistake.
IF I COULD CHANGE ONE THING
For these fauxhemian tourists at least, the 16th feels far from the swing of things.
The writer was a guest of the hotel.