25 Interesting Hotels in Paris

A public pool, a post office, a bank, a brothel, a prince’s mansion, and the palaces where history happened.

A public swimming pool, the central post office, a bank headquarters, a Belle Époque brothel, and a Bonaparte prince’s mansion all rent rooms in Paris tonight. So do the hotels where a German general ran the occupied city in 1944 and where the Vietnam War peace accords were signed in 1973.

Every hotel on the list has a story about who built it, what it used to be, or what happened inside. The list is grouped, not ranked. Each name links to the hotel’s official site, where the rate is current and the booking is direct.

The grand old ones

Ritz Paris · Place Vendôme

César Ritz opened his hotel on Place Vendôme in 1898, with Auguste Escoffier in charge of the kitchen. Coco Chanel, whose fashion house stood around the corner on rue Cambon, started coming in the 1920s and moved in for good in 1954, by the hotel’s account. The bar carries Ernest Hemingway’s name, and the legend says he arrived in August 1944 to “liberate” it.

Le Bristol · Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Hippolyte Jammet bought the former property of Jules de Castellane in 1923 and opened Le Bristol in April 1925, naming it for Frederick Hervey, the 18th-century Earl of Bristol and traveling bishop. In June 1940 the hotel took in the American Embassy and American citizens, and Jammet kept it from being requisitioned. The sixth-floor pool, added in 1980, was drawn by the designer of Onassis’s yacht and is shaped like a ship’s prow.

Plaza Athénée · Avenue Montaigne

The Plaza Athénée opened on avenue Montaigne on April 20, 1913, a few weeks before the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées opened next door. The Relais Plaza restaurant followed in 1936, modeled on the first-class dining room of the liner Normandie. By the hotel’s account, Christian Dior opened his first boutique on the avenue in 1946 to catch its guests.

InterContinental Paris Le Grand · Opéra

Empress Eugénie inaugurated the Grand Hôtel on May 5, 1862, with 800 rooms, 45 salons, and the Café de la Paix on the ground floor. Georges Clemenceau watched troops parade from its balcony in 1918, and preparatory talks for the Atlantic Pact met in its salons in 1948.

Four Seasons George V · Champs-Élysées

Joel Hillman, an American businessman, financed the Art Deco George V in 1928 and named it for the British king. Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bought it in 1996, closed it for two years, and reopened it under Four Seasons in December 1999.

Where history happened

Hôtel de Crillon · Place de la Concorde

Ange-Jacques Gabriel designed this palace on Place de la Concorde for Louis XV in 1758. In the usual telling, France signed its 1778 treaties with the new United States inside, with Benjamin Franklin among the Americans. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine on the square out front in 1793. The building opened as a hotel in 1909, and Karl Lagerfeld designed its Grands Appartements in the restoration that ran from 2013 to 2017.

Le Meurice · Tuileries

Charles-Augustin Meurice, whose family kept a hotel in Calais, opened Le Meurice on rue de Rivoli in 1835 for British travelers. Picasso held his wedding banquet here, and Salvador Dalí spent about a month a year in the old royal suite for some thirty years. In August 1944 General Dietrich von Choltitz commanded occupied Paris from the hotel, and he never carried out Hitler’s order to destroy the city.

Lutetia · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The Boucicaut family, owners of the Bon Marché department store across the square, opened the Lutetia in 1910 for the store’s best customers and suppliers. German forces requisitioned it during the Occupation. After the liberation it took in deportees coming home from the camps, and families came to the lobby to search for their people. Mandarin Oriental has run it since 2025.

The Peninsula Paris · Arc de Triomphe

The Hôtel Majestic opened on avenue Kléber in 1908, and George Gershwin wrote An American in Paris while staying here in 1928. The French state bought the building in 1936, UNESCO made it its first headquarters in 1946, and on January 27, 1973 the Paris Peace Accords ending American involvement in the Vietnam War were signed inside. The Peninsula reopened it as a hotel on August 1, 2014.

Sofitel Le Scribe · Opéra

The Jockey Club kept its home in this building on boulevard des Capucines, by the hotel’s account. On December 28, 1895, in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café on the ground floor, the Lumière brothers held the first public film screening for a paying audience.

Used to be something else

Shangri-La Paris · Trocadéro

Prince Roland Bonaparte, Napoleon’s grandnephew and a geographer and botanist, built this mansion on avenue d’Iéna in the 1890s. The building is a listed historic monument, and Shangri-La opened it as a hotel in 2010. Rooms on the river side look across the Seine at the Eiffel Tower.

Saint James Paris · Porte Dauphine

Paris’s first aerodrome stood on this ground, and hot-air balloons lifted off from it. In 1892 Élise Thiers, widow of President Adolphe Thiers, built the Fondation Thiers here to house young scholars, and the name is still carved on the pediment. A London-style private club moved in after 1986, and the house became a hotel in the early 1990s; it bills itself as the only château-hotel in Paris.

Molitor · Auteuil

Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, later Hollywood’s Tarzan, opened the Molitor pools in 1929, and Louis Réard introduced the bikini at a fashion show here on July 5, 1946. The pools closed in 1989, were listed as a historic monument in 1990, and street artists covered the empty walls in the years that followed. The complex reopened in 2014 as a hotel with both pools and 124 rooms around them.

Cheval Blanc Paris · Pont Neuf

Ernest Cognacq opened La Samaritaine by the Pont Neuf in 1870 and ran it with his wife, Marie-Louise Jaÿ. The store grew to four buildings, with the Seine-side extension by Frantz Jourdain and Henri Sauvage built from 1926 to 1928, and it closed in 2005 over fire-safety problems. LVMH reopened it in 2021 with a Cheval Blanc hotel in the building on the river.

Madame Rêve · Les Halles

Julien Guadet built the central post office on rue du Louvre in the 1880s, and Parisians knew it as the post office that never closed. After a long restoration the building reopened with the post office downstairs and Madame Rêve’s rooms above, topped by a rooftop bar called ROOF.

Hôtel Banke · Grands Boulevards

Paul Friesé and Cassien Bernard built this headquarters for the Banque Suisse et Française in the early 1900s, and the city gave the building its gold medal in 1908. The banking hall under the glass cupola keeps its counters and mosaic floor, and the old vault downstairs still holds the original safes, several never opened. By the hotel’s account, an earlier palace on the site is where Hortense de Beauharnais gave birth to the future Napoleon III in 1808.

Les Bains · Le Marais

The Bains Guerbois opened in 1885 as a private bathhouse, and by the hotel’s account Zola, Monet, and Manet met there and Marcel Proust was a regular. In 1978 the building became Les Bains Douches, the nightclub with Philippe Starck’s black-and-white dance floor, and Grace Jones, Jack Nicholson, and Kate Moss were among its crowd. It reopened in 2015 as a hotel with 39 rooms.

Maison Souquet · Pigalle

This house on rue de Bruxelles opened in 1905 as a licensed brothel, entered in the register of pleasure houses, a few minutes’ walk from the Moulin Rouge. Two red lanterns still mark the entrance, and the 20 rooms carry the names of Belle Époque courtesans such as La Belle Otero and Cléo de Mérode.

Small, literary, strange

L’Hôtel · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The hotel says this 1828 building stands on the site of Queen Margot’s 17th-century pavilion of love. As the Hôtel d’Alsace it was Oscar Wilde’s last address; he died here in 1900, and legend gives him a final line about the wallpaper. Jacques Garcia decorated the 20 rooms, and a hammam pool sits underground beneath them.

Hôtel d’Angleterre · Rue Jacob

The building held the British Embassy in the late 18th century, which is where the name comes from. By the hotel’s account, the 1783 Treaty of Paris was meant to be signed here until Benjamin Franklin refused to set foot on British soil. Ernest and Hadley Hemingway stayed in room 14 in December 1921, and Charles Lindbergh checked in after his 1927 flight.

Hôtel La Louisiane · Rue de Seine

A former colonel of Napoleon’s founded La Louisiane on rue de Seine in 1823, and the Blanchot family has run it since the 1930s. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir took rooms here in 1943, and the existentialists used it as their headquarters for the rest of the decade. The Egyptian-born novelist Albert Cossery lived here for more than fifty years, until his death in 2008.

Hôtel des Grands Hommes · Latin Quarter

This 18th-century building faces the Panthéon and takes its name from the motto on the monument’s pediment, “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.” André Breton lived in one of its rooms in 1918 and 1919 and wrote Les Champs magnétiques here with Philippe Soupault, the first work of automatic writing and the start of Surrealism.

Le Pavillon de la Reine · Place des Vosges

Place des Vosges opened as the Place Royale in 1612 for the engagement of Louis XIII, and it is the oldest planned square in Paris. The hotel takes its name from his queen, Anne of Austria, who by the hotel’s account lived in the wing between the house and the square. Victor Hugo and Colette both lived on the square.

Terrass” Hôtel · Montmartre

Edmond Hurand, who already owned the Élysée-Montmartre, built a 120-room hotel at the corner of rue Caulaincourt and rue Joseph de Maistre in 1911, with a rooftop terrace over the whole city. His family still runs it. Colette, the actor Michel Simon, and the pianist Samson François were regulars.

Hôtel Lancaster · Champs-Élysées

This rue de Berri mansion went up in 1889, and the Swiss hotelier Émile Wolf turned it into a hotel in 1925 and filled it with 17th-century art and furniture. Marlene Dietrich lived here for three years from 1937, and a suite still carries her name. Some 80 portraits by the Russian painter Boris Pastoukhoff, from Wolf’s collection, hang in the house.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are these hotels ranked?
No. The groups sort them by character, and the order inside each group carries no meaning.

What made a hotel interesting enough for this list?
A story. Every entry was a pool, a bank, a post office, a brothel, a department store, or a prince’s mansion, or something happened inside that went into the history books. Comfort alone did not qualify a hotel.

Why are there no prices?
Rates change daily, and lists with prices go stale in a month. Every hotel name links to the hotel’s official site, where the rate is current and the booking is direct.

Which hotels put me closest to the stations for your day trips?
Our Normandy trains leave from Saint-Lazare, the Mont-Saint-Michel, Loire, and Bordeaux trains from Montparnasse, and the Burgundy train from Gare de Lyon. Le Grand and the Scribe stand at Opéra, a short walk from Saint-Lazare. The Lutetia, L’Hôtel, La Louisiane, and the Angleterre are one metro ride from Montparnasse with no change, and the Pavillon de la Reine is a short ride from Gare de Lyon on line 1. Our page on how our day trips work lists every station and meeting point.

Do the small hotels book out faster than the palaces?
Usually. L’Hôtel and Maison Souquet have 20 rooms each, the Hôtel des Grands Hommes has 30, and Les Bains has 39. Book those before the palaces.

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