The Peninsula Paris

The ground at 19 avenue Kléber held a private palace long before it held a hotel, raised in 1864 by a Russian collector who wanted a Versailles of his own, then home to Isabella II of Spain, who lived out her exile there and died in the house in 1904. It came down soon after. Leonard Tauber put a grand hotel on the site and Armand Sibien's Majestic opened in 1908. The French state bought the building in 1936, and UNESCO's preparatory commission moved in from London on 16 September 1946, the organisation itself staying until 1958, secretaries sharing the largest bedrooms with their files stacked in the wardrobes. The Paris Peace Accords were negotiated in 1973 in the oak-panelled room that is now the bar.

Putting it back took stone from the same quarries at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, Chauvigny and Comblanchien that supplied the 1908 facade, and twenty stonemasons to recut what had gone missing. In the lobby hangs Luděk Hroch's Dancing Leaves, eight hundred hand-blown plane leaves each modelled on a real one, the plane tree being what Paris happens to share with Hong Kong. Around three thousand people worked on the building.

Two hundred rooms now, ninety-three of them suites, and the art on their walls was commissioned for the building. Deluxe Rooms look onto avenue Kléber, rue de Pérouse or the courtyards, while the Rooftop Eiffel Suite runs to 139 square metres with a garden of its own. Every room has a walk-in dressing room and a vanity area. The nail dryer is built in.