If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR1,681.82), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
You can’t live in the past, but you’re practically Marie Antoinette’s roommate at iconic Parisian stay Hôtel de Crillon, a Rosewood Hotel. Beyond the 18th-century palais’ Corinthian-column-lined, Coustou-sculpture-climbed façade – overlooking Place de la Concorde – are rooms where the teen queen learnt piano, gilded halls where the League of Nations was formed, Versailles-inspired appartements designed by Karl Lagerfeld, and pieds-à-terre stayed in by VIPs from Teddy Roosevelt to Taylor Swift. Its both witness to extraordinary French eras and a temple to art de vivre, with tasting menus tailored to your wine choice (from tens of thousands of bottles), its own pâtisserie, a butler as standard, and the kind of opulent swagger that caused Hemingway to namecheck it – it’s a legend with a lot more living to do…
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Noon. Check-in is at 3pm. These times are flexible on some dates, subject to availability, and must be confirmed in advance; early arrivals and late departures may be subject to a fee. In-room check-in is available on request.
Prices
Double rooms from £1587.04 (€1,850), including tax at 10 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of €14.95 per person per night on check-out.
More details
Some rates include breakfast (otherwise it’s from €35 a person).
Also
A handful of rooms and suites have been adapted to be wheelchair-accessible; however there are some public spaces with a small number of stairs to navigate.
At the hotel
Spa with a hammam and sauna; 24-hour fitness studio; hair salon and barbershop; lounges, terraces and courtyards; wine cellar; butler, packing and pressing services on request; business centre; newspapers on request; free WiFi. In rooms: TV, Bluetooth sound-system, gourmet minibar, Nespresso coffee machine and a selection of Palais des Thés teas, free bottled water, and bespoke toiletries by Officine Universelle Buly 1803.
Our favourite rooms
Each room and suite here will sweep you back to the opulence of 18th-century Paris, with all modern luxuries, of course. There are bespoke furnishings and custom bath products from heritage brand Buly 1803; artworks hand-selected by four different interior designers; antiques and objets; and luxury redolent in every fabric and finish. But, the Ateliers and Signature Suites are more historically significant (and have panoramic city views, most including the Eiffel Tower): say the Suite Duc de Crillon, housed in the noble family’s former chapel, rich in sacramental gilding; Suite Bernstein, evoking art deco touches for the composer and frequent guest; Suite Marie Antoinette, where the ill-fated queen would practise piano; and the Grands Appartements, designed by Karl Lagerfeld. You might not be able to take home that Napoleonic desk or psychedelically marbled deep-soak bath tub, but the hotel does sell robes, coffee-makers, toiletries, Rivolta Carmigniani linens and more, should you wish to bring a little Parisian flair home.
Poolside
The spa’s pool may be on the petite side, but it still dazzles, lined with 17,600 sparkling gold scales.
Spa
Cognac-infused facials and almond baths may have been how past French elites counteracted the stress of the revolucion, but Sense, a Rosewood Spa tweaks spoiling for modern stressors (dodging tourists on the Champs-Élysées, deciding which pastry to try…). CBD infusions, lomi-lomi massages, shiatsu, naturopath sessions and time spent in the sauna, hammam and experience shower, and basking in front of the Himalayan salt wall, will leave you feeling as coolly insouciant as the locals. Potions from Sisley, Maison Caulières and Evidens de Beauté leave you smelling luxurious, and more serious spoiling comes in the form of face peels, neurofeedback training and non-invasive facelifts. There’s a beauty salon, barbershop and hair-styling by David Lucas, and seasonal workshops with the likes of Maison Gynécée (focusing on female wellness) and Arthur Guérin-Boëri (for breathwork). And the fitness studio is kitted out with top-of-the-line tech and personal trainers.
Packing tips
No powdered wigs or pompadours required, but you will want something white-tie-worthy to swan about in after dark. Otherwise the hotel has pretty much everything you need, including a butler to unpack and re-pack your case on request.
Also
The hotel has a tightly curated boutique, stocked with La Luzeronde sunglasses, Calming Park candles, Camille Fournet leather accessories, Hector Saxe custom board games, Koché streetwear, Aviteur luggage and Kiade yacht models.
Pet‐friendly
Les chiens are just as spoilt as any guest here; those weighing under 10 kilogrammes can stay for €50 a stay, and are welcome everywhere except L’Ecrin restaurant and the spa. See more pet-friendly hotels in Paris.
Children
As you’d expect from a hotel where each room has an assigned butler, Crillon is very family friendly, with special extras for kids, baby kit and itineraries to keep little ones entertained.
Best for
All ages.
Recommended rooms
Rooms and suites can either fit an extra bed (free for under-14s; €200 a night for older teens) or can interconnect with another to make an even more grand apartment. Some of the more historic suites may not be best suited to rambunctious tots.
Activities
The hotel has toys, board games, tents, games consoles and more for little ones to borrow, but as part of the hotel’s Rose Buds programme, the concierge and your butler can also cue up exciting activities for les enfants, such as photo journaling with a Polaroid camera, movie nights, escape-room-style games at Parisian monuments, and family bootcamps in the Tuileries gardens.
Swimming pool
Kids are welcome to use the (unsupervised) spa pool – just keep an eye on the noise levels.
Meals
Lucky little ones can boss about chef Boris Campanella and pâtissier Matthieu Carlin, demanding nuggets, mini hamburgers, pancakes, cookies or whatever takes their fancy.
Babysitting
There’s little the concierge can’t arrange.
No need to pack
The hotel has mini bathrobes and slippers, baby baths and gentle toiletries, highchairs, bottle-warmers, safety kits, and much more.
Also
Kids get a stuffed elephant and interactive book about Paris on arrival, and on request the hotel can arrange matching Brai pyjamas for the family and have Smallable set up the room with toys and more for your arrival.
Sustainability efforts
Rosewood is a responsible custodian of one of Paris’ most important buildings, and Hôtel de Crillon’s recent sensitive restoration worked to gently enhance its spaces while preserving its 18th-century features. Architect Richard Martinet – skilled in bringing antique buildings back to life – assembled an impressive team of talents to uphold the hotel’s status (even Karl Lagerfeld, an avid delver into French history, came on board to design the Grands Appartements). And, alongside safeguarding the past, Rosewood looks to the future, hiring and sourcing locally, offering development opportunities for staff and even redesigning uniforms (heels swapped for ballet flats, scarves replacing ties) with comfort in mind, as part of the ‘Rosewood Empowers’ programme; while ‘Rosewood Sustains’ keeps operations running in eco-friendly style. Single-use plastics have been eliminated, UV films have been placed over windows, older hairdryers are donated to a local womens' shelter and recycling is duly done, too.
The hotel’s courtyard feels like a city secret with its chic stripy seats and alabaster sculptures, and private room La Cave has a metallic ceiling and wine-lined walls. If you’re lucky enough to have one, take apéritifs on your terrace.
Dress Code
Don’t gold-plate yourself, but luxury needn’t be discreet here – shrug on that (faux) fur, flash those red soles, conspicuously check the time on that Cartier watch, layer those Boucheron bangles…
Hotel restaurant
The hotel has a trio of delightful restaurants. Nonos et Comestibles par Paul Pairet gets a oui, oui from us for reviving the classique grill, with gallic stalwarts: pâté en croûte, eggs mimosa, garlicky snails, beef tartare, cheese soufflé, and perfectly flamed steaks with generous ladlings of béarnaise or bordelaise, plus charcuteries, croques and more for lunches. It’s couched in the hotel’s more casual, but no less elegant, dining room. Not so at L’Écrin, with its geometric ceiling and avant-garde chandeliers. The bottles in its cellar number 2,300-plus (expertly wrangled by head sommelier Xavier Thuizat), and the five- or seven-course tasting menus are crafted around your choice of wine, but might include spider crab, blue lobster, Limousin pork, Burgundy beef, or rhubarb flavoured with tarragon (don’t worry, chef Boris Campanella is a safe pair of hands). It’s here that representatives from renowned French vineyards arrive with clinking cases for special wine dinners too. And, Jardin d’Hiver serves decadent breakfasts, then dressed lobster, ceviches, focaccias, and caviars in a space stuffed with regal purple sofas, yet more chandeliers and statement flowers. Its dining room also spills out into the hotel’s interior courtyard, previously unused and now a fabulous sanctuary from the city’s busiest boulevards. And, you shall eat cake(s) here – Butterfly Pâtisserie has a work-of-art selection of millefeuilles, tartes, éclairs, and flans, alongside light savouries.
Hotel bar
Bar les Ambassadeurs isn’t a half measures kind of place – marble slabs line the walls, a frieze of cherubs pout and pose, mouldings are coated in gold, chandeliers dangle and there’s a grand piano awaiting a gloved player in the corner (but lest you worry it’s po-faced here, Mike D from the Beastie Boys once DJ-ed till late). Cocktails here call for some theatrics behind the bar and in flavour pairings – say, La Brillante with maté, CBD, pineapple and cardamom; or L’Adulé with Woodford Reserve, coconut, miso and fig. And there’s a flowing list of champagnes, cognacs and chartreuses too. Nonos has more classic cocktails; Jardin d’Hiver has French 75s and absinthe-infused mules, plus seasonal iterations; and at all eateries waiters are ready with a corkscrew.
Last orders
At Jardin d’Hiver, breakfast is from 7am to 11am, lunch from noon to 3pm, and dinner from 7pm to 10pm. Dinner is from 7pm at L’Écrin, and at Nonos et Comestibles par Paul Pairet, lunch is from noon, dinner from 7pm.
Room service
Want to seductively feed each other éclairs? Room service till 11.30pm lets you do this and keep a sense of public decorum.
Hôtel de Crillon has perhaps the most significant Paris address possible without moving into the Louvre, overlooking the Place de la Concorde, giving it a front seat to the city’s revolutions and uprisings.
Planes
Orly Airport is the closest at 40 minutes’ drive away; and Paris Charles de Gaulle is around an hour. For domestic or chartered private flights, there’s Le Bourget airport around an hour away. Transfers (in a hybrid on request) from all can be arranged through the concierge on request.
Trains
The Concorde Metro stop is mere steps from the hotel; it’s on lines 1, 8 and 12, which will get you pretty much wherever you want to go in the city. For cross-country railway stations, the gares du Nord, de l'Est, Lyon, Saint Lazare, and Austerlitz are all a 30-minute taxi ride away.
Automobiles
Paris is a city for flâneurs, so leave the wheels and pound the rues or hop on the Metro if you get tired. If you bring a car, make use of the hotel’s valet services (€50 a day) as parking is notoriously a nightmare, or call on the hotel’s luxurious courtesy car, a beautifully restored, Parisian-grey 1973 Citroën DS Pallas for short stylish jaunts (subject to availability). There's also public parking close by for the same price.
Worth getting out of bed for
Few stays can claim such a significant part in history as Rosewood’s Hôtel de Crillon – this palais that King Louis XV commissioned on Place de la Concorde in 1758 has seen treaties forged between the French and the Americans, revolutions rise and empires form and fall, royal glories and guillotinings, served as a home for the noblest of families, and secured its reputation as one of Paris’s most iconic hotels since 1909, hosting World War I peace envoys, exclusive debutante balls, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, and more recently the likes of Taylor Swift, Roger Federer, and Ben Affleck and J-Lo on their honeymoon. Four designers (Tristan Auer, Chahan Minassian, Cyril Vergniol and Karl Lagerfeld) and Culture in Architecture founder Aline Asmar d’Amman were called on for styling advice during its four-year makeover, using work by 147 artists and 250 craftspeople, so make your first mission a self-guided tour of this monumental hideaway. Bliss out in the spa and golden pool, take champagne afternoon tea in the courtyard and ask sommelier Xavier Thuizat to treat you to a wine tasting of some of the 40,000 bottles in the hotel’s cellar. Floral designer Djordje Varda holds masterclasses and Bar Les Ambassadeurs’ mixologists will teach you shaking and stirring skills. The Clefs d’Or concierge can arrange private tours of the Louvre, just down the road; dinner while floating along the Seine; intimate visits to Versailles; a jaunt to undertakers turned multidisciplinary arts space the Cent Quatre or the Louis Vuitton Foundation followed by a stroll through the Jardin d’Acclimatation; and exclusive access to fashion ateliers. There’s the Champs-Élysées for noted labels, Place Vendôme for jewellers and Galeries Lafayette for everything (ascend to the seventh floor for its panoramic views). The Musée d'Orsay, Petit Palais, Bourse de Commerce, and contemporary photography gallery Jeu de Paume are an easy walk away, as is the Palais Garnier for operatic evenings. And pass through Île de la Cité on your way over the the Left Bank to seek out the weird and wonderful in its triumvirate of gallery- and curiosity shop-lined streets: Rue Saint André des Arts, Rue de Seine and Rue Mazarine.
Local restaurants
Yes, you might be in map-clutching tourist-central in Paris, but dining here isn’t all lamenting the McDonalds on Rue de Rivoli and subsisting on Ladurée macarons. Once you’ve swept through the hotel’s suite of eateries in a whirl of caviar and champagne, head to Pavyllon, a many-Michelin-star-holding eatery where inspiration is found in teppanyaki Nordic flavours, Italian heritage cuisine… You might have Utah Beach oysters with herb granita and lemon croutons; a curried manouche (Lebanese flatbread) stuffed with black garlic, pistachio and ginger; or apricot and chanterelle puff pastry. Close to Galeries Lafayette is theatrically rouged Mondaine de Pariso, with swooping curtains, leopard-print velvets and saucy photographs – the menu is simple yet decadent, with caviar pizzetta, king crab and truffled linguine. For more eateries with Crillon-esque pomp and cachet, there’s noted establishments like Le Cinq and Fouquet’s; or there’s Pages, whose white brick walls do away with any frippery and rather poetically are meant to resemble blank sheets of paper. Dishes take notes from Japan, and plates arrive with artichoke and lobster doughnuts, trout omelette with fermented cucumber in anchovy cream, or scallop tart topped with caviar and hazelnut. And Beefbar’s exceptional steaks can be enjoyed in one of the city’s most beautiful Belle Époque buildings, La Fermette Marbeuf.
Local cafés
Restaurant Le Drugstore is a sleek, chic breakfasting spot, of the sort where you can start your day with madeleines and marbled cake. And Crillon’s concierge can arrange a special breakfast at the obvious but must-try-at-least-once choice Café de Flore.
Local bars
For drinks, head over to Le Marais, or edge up into the 10th. The former has colourful drinkeries such as Andy Wahloo (we love the disco flooring), pink and floral Bisou, and Mezcaleria for tequila shots under a woven roof supporting a huge neon cross. While the latter has Le Syndicat (51 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis), a very cool bar disguised as a shabbily postered-over awning, where barkeeps give French spirits excellent PR with their imaginative cocktails.
When I told my French mother-in-law where we were staying in Paris, she gasped. This was THE HOTEL, she said – the best, the swishiest, the most glamorous place to stay in Paris and therefore, the whole of France. Good, I thought. We arrived on an awkward day – the entire area (the hotel is positioned right on Place de la Concorde, with the Musèe de l’Orangerie, Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre all within walking distance) was closed, due to the Rugby World Cup. When I approached a police officer by one of the barriers, he almost bowed when I told him where we were trying to go, and ushered us through. It was the kind of service we quickly came to expect.
We checked in via an inviting little salon laden with elaborate wood detailing and plush chairs – it felt like stepping into a glamorous time machine. Each guest is assigned a butler. It was unclear what their role was, beyond calling themself a butler, but honestly, that was sort of enough. The staff were delightful and cheery, the only hiccup being when I asked the concierge Metro directions to a flea market on the outskirts of town – they were adamant we must get a taxi to such a ‘dodgy area’. I smiled tightly, and eventually we were allowed to risk the journey. We floated past the gilt tables, laden with sweeties, and past the other guests, each of whom looked like royalty and were followed by a man carrying Hermès, Dior and Chanel shopping bags. Which is when I suddenly understood the point of a butler.
Hôtel de Crillon has a history – it has welcomed the likes of Louis XV and Marie Antoinette, and the interiors lean gratefully into that grandeur. The hotel was built at Louis IV’s request and later served as a residence for Count de Crillon until becoming a hotel in 1909. It reopened in 2017, after a four-year renovation by the Lebanese architect Aline Asmar d’Amman, as a Rosewood hotel. The lobby sees a long hallway branch off into the bars, three restaurants (one hidden behind a secret door), a pâtisserie and then down to the spa. Breakfast is served in Jardin d’Hiver and Bar Les Ambassadeurs, which is pleasingly regal – the ceiling is a registered landmark that the architects worked to restore and highlight the bar’s stately atmosphere. Breakfast options include scrambled eggs with caviar, and most guests add a mimosa. It was a hot morning, but the bar was dim and opulent – instruments were propped, waiting for the evening’s band, and the walls shimmered with purple mica stone. Nonos & Comestibles down the hall is led by Michelin-starred chef Paul Pairet, serving lunch and dinner, and the Butterfly Pâtisserie offers treats at teatime. And then there's the Michelin-starred L’Ecrin, which offers a fine-dining experience where the food is matched to the exquisite wines, instead of vice versa. But step outside the hotel for a simpler dinner, and the whole of Paris is within walking distance, or a Metro stop or two. A favourite discovery, down the road, was Doki Doki, the city’s first handroll sushi bar – very chic, and terribly delicious.
There are 124 rooms, designed around a palette of gold and grey. The bathrooms are decadent marble, with tellies in the mirrors, and bath tubs the depth of the Seine, or thereabouts. Beds are suitably divine, with crisp white Rivolta Carmignani Italian linens, and French pillows and duvets by Drouault. There are 10 signature suites, including the Grands Appartements, designed by Karl Lagerfeld. Suite Louis XV overlooks the Place de la Concorde, Eiffel Tower and Grand Palais; and the Suite Duc de Crillon boasts the original woodwork from the former private chapel of the namesake duke (the rest is displayed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art). Our window looked down into the courtyard, the centre of which is dissected by the glass roof of the swimming pool below.
The spa is an underground maze of curved corridors, which opens onto the swimming pool. Comprising 17,600 ‘gold scales’, the modest pool glitters beneath its glass roof. Heated stone beds and eucalyptus steam rooms are secreted around the corner, along with a grooming salon, barber and fitness area. Unlike a business hotel though, the gym appeared rarely used – guests congregate instead upstairs in the bar, where the champagne list is comprehensive, and cocktails can be ordered by rolling a dice. Decadence is king here, rather than ab-work, or indeed, sweat. Which I appreciated.
This is high luxury, without either intimidating service or stuffy interiors – a truly elegant and timeless experience, and the perfect base from which to rediscover Paris. One day I’ll bring my mother-in-law.
