Hôtel Plaza Athénée

On Avenue Montaigne in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, Hôtel Plaza Athénée has occupied its position as one of the defining addresses of Parisian luxury hospitality since 1913, when the building was completed with the red-geranium-draped facade and the stone arcade that have since become among the most recognised images in the visual language of Parisian grand hotels. The 208 rooms and suites were renovated to a standard that maintains the Art Deco character of the public spaces while introducing a palette of silks, brocades, and bespoke furnishings in the private rooms that reflects the Avenue Montaigne’s positioning as Paris’s most concentrated luxury fashion corridor — Dior, Chanel, Valentino, Prada, and Miu Miu are all within a few steps of the hotel’s entrance.

Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, the chef’s three-Michelin-starred flagship restaurant within the hotel, pursues a programme of naturalité — cuisine built around the purest expressions of seasonal produce, with minimal transformation and maximum precision — in a setting of extraordinary visual theatre designed by Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku. The Bar at the Plaza serves what many consider the best cocktail programme in the 8th arrondissement, and the Dior Institut spa occupies a dedicated beauty space within the hotel in a partnership between two institutions whose histories are intertwined through the Avenue Montaigne they have shared for decades. The Eiffel Tower views from upper-floor suites are a frequently cited distinction among the hotel’s most prized accommodation.

The Plaza Athénée’s longevity at its Avenue Montaigne address gives it the same kind of institutional weight in Paris’s fashion and luxury world that the Crillon carries in the political and diplomatic sphere: it is a hotel whose guests return across generations, whose public rooms have been the setting for significant personal and professional moments in the lives of the people who make Parisian fashion and culture, and whose architecture has become part of the visual identity of the city’s most commercially and aesthetically ambitious street.