Hôtel Plaza Athénée

The name came off an older house, the Grand Hôtel Athénée on the rue Scribe, opened in 1867. Jules Cadillat commissioned the avenue Montaigne building in 1911, to Charles Lefebvre's designs, and it opened in April 1913 under Émile Armbruster, who named it. It spread along numbers 21 to 27 through the 1920s, shut in 1934, and reopened in 1936 after François Dupré bought the name. Forte held it from 1968, and it has been in Brunei hands since 1997, run by the group that took the Dorchester Collection name in 2006. The facade on the avenue, the roof, the hall, the grande galerie, the dining room and the salon Montaigne were inscribed on the French heritage register on 4 November 1994.

Le Relais Plaza at number 21 was built in 1936 by Constant Lefranc and carries its own listing, though the protection covers only the shopfront and a carved panel above the bar, a huntress goddess by Francine Saquy. The 1930s fittings are still in, including the luminous ceiling.

The works of 2013 and 2014 took the hotel across four adjoining buildings and added 5,500 square metres. Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku did the gastronomic room and Le Bar. The bar counter is cast resin, white drawn through a clear body, and the ceiling above it is blue fabric worked to read as a storm.

There are 154 rooms and 54 suites over eight floors, Régence and Louis XV and XVI lower down and art deco on the top two. Christian Dior opened his house along the avenue at number 30 in 1946, and the first Dior spa anywhere opened here in 2008, relaunched in September 2023. Olivier Riols designed the cour-jardin, which takes a real ice rink of about a hundred square metres through the winter.