Le Meurice

Charles-Augustin Meurice had run a coaching inn at Calais since 1771, meeting the English off the Channel packet, and he opened in Paris early in the nineteenth century on the rue Saint-Honoré. The move to 228 rue de Rivoli came in 1835, into the arcaded front Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine had drawn for the street. It changed hands often after that, from CIGA in 1972 to the Aga Khan, who held it personally until 1997, when it went to the Brunei Investment Agency, whose hotels took the Dorchester Collection name in 2006.

Henri-Paul Nénot, who had taken the Grand Prix de Rome, directed the rebuild that pulled the hotel together after it absorbed the neighbouring Hôtel Métropole on the rue de Castiglione. The public rooms date from 1905 to 1907, and the main dining room was worked up from the Salon de la Paix at Versailles. Lavalley, Faivre and Poilpot did the decorative painting, and a Lavalley fresco is still in the bar.

Salvador Dalí took the old suite of Alfonso XIII of Spain, rooms 106 and 108, for about a month a year across roughly thirty years, and it carries his name now.

Philippe Starck came in twice, first in 2007 and again for a campaign finished in 2016 covering the restaurants and the public rooms. His daughter Ara Starck painted the canvas over Le Dalí, 145 square metres of it, and laid in a carpet to answer it. Bar 228 keeps a Carrara counter under a painted sky.

There are 160 rooms and suites, 121 of the first and 39 of the second, Louis XVI by tradition and now being refurbished away from it. The Belle Étoile penthouse sits on the seventh floor, with a terrace that runs the whole way round.