Le Bristol Paris

Hippolyte Jammet bought the old Castellane property in 1924 and had it pulled down, handing the site to Gustave Umbdenstock and Urbain Cassan, who raised an Art Deco palace. It opened in April 1925, named for Frederick Augustus Hervey, fourth Earl of Bristol, an eighteenth-century bishop whose travels set the standard for comfort. Rudolf August Oetker bought it in 1978 and it has stayed in his family. No two of the 188 rooms repeat, which is less flourish than consequence: locksmiths, carpenters, marble workers and decorative painters keep workshops on the premises and make whatever the house needs.

For the centenary in 2025, Elvira and Narcisa Oetker reworked the Suite Impériale with the architect Pierre-Yves Rochon and the painter George Condo, whose pictures now hang across its 320 square metres, with a connecting bedroom left as his studio, easel and paints still in it. The doorknob he designed for it is a gilded clown's head titled Uncle Joe.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd redrew the garden in 2017, pleached hornbeam and black slate rills under treillage, all of it on roof slabs above an underground garage with almost no soil to plant into. The spa's eight treatment rooms open onto it.

Cäsar Pinnau, who drew the yachts of Onassis and Niarchos, built the pool six floors up and worked the room into a ship, a wooden deck around the water, a painted sail over the ceiling and a mural of passengers at the stern looking toward Cap d'Antibes. The Eiffel Tower stands in the far window.