Paris, France

The Ritz Paris

The hotel that gave its name to a word: Place Vendôme grandeur, gilded and glittering as ever.

Destination

Paris, France

Standard

Five-star and above

From

From ~$1,800/night

Known for

Place Vendôme location

The place

RomanticCityIconic

On the Place Vendôme since 1898, The Ritz is the original by which all others are measured. Hemingway drank here, Chanel lived here, and after a top-to-toe restoration it gleams brighter than ever. Garlands of gilt, the sabre-cracked champagne of Bar Hemingway, a subterranean Chanel spa and a garden courtyard for long lunches: it is grandeur that never tips into stuffiness.

Rooms & Suites

Behind the Place Vendôme façade, 142 rooms and suites carry the Ritz's particular grammar of luxury: marble bathrooms with swan-necked gold taps, canopied beds dressed in hand-embroidered linen, and the hush of a hotel that has spent more than a century perfecting the art of arrival. The Prestige suites bear the names of those who lived here: Coco Chanel kept an apartment on the rue Cambon side for over thirty years, and her suite still looks out over the square she made her own. Every room was taken back to the stone in the four-year restoration, so the gilding gleams as it did in 1898, only warmer.

Dining

Dining at the Ritz is theatre with a Michelin pedigree. L'Espadon holds court beneath a frescoed sky and a retractable glass roof, its tasting menus a quiet argument for why French haute cuisine still matters. Downstairs, Bar Hemingway pours what many insist is the finest martini in Paris: the room the writer 'liberated' in 1944, presided over with theatrical precision. For something lighter, the Bar Vendôme spills into a garden courtyard, and the Comptoir sends out sculptural fruit pastries to a queue that forms before it opens.

Spa & Wellness

The Ritz Club unfolds underground in a wash of gold mosaic and columned calm, home to the first Chanel spa in the world. The pool, a trompe-l'œil sky overhead and loungers along the marble edge, feels less like a hotel amenity than a private Roman bath rediscovered beneath the 1st arrondissement. Treatments follow the Chanel canon; the mood is unhurried, cocooned, entirely removed from the city overhead.

Experiences

Step out of the door and the Place Vendôme is yours: Napoleon's column at its centre, the great jewellers under the arcades, the Tuileries and the Louvre a short walk east. Ask the concierge and more opens up: an after-hours view of a couture atelier, a table that doesn't officially exist, a morning at the École Ritz Escoffier folding pastry the way the hotel's own kitchen does. This is a base camp for Paris at its most gilded, and the staff have spent careers making the impossible seem merely well-organised.

Why we love it

Because no hotel has ever confused luxury with excess quite so gracefully. The Ritz gave its name to a word, then spent a century earning it back. It is the rare palace where the legend and the lived reality are, improbably, the same thing, where you can stand in the bar Hemingway drank in, sleep along the square Chanel called home, and feel not like a tourist among relics but a guest the place has been quietly expecting.