3 Paris Hotels With a Past: Wilde, Chanel, and Hemingway
Paris has hundreds of luxury hotels, and most of them are excellent.
The ones you remember are the ones where the building itself has more history than most cities, where checking in means stepping into something that has been going on for a long time without you.
Three of them have been doing that for over a century.
The Hermès Family’s Secret Garden
The entrance to Hôtel Particulier Montmartre is easy to miss.
You ring an intercom on a cobblestone passage off Avenue Junot, a gate opens, and you find yourself in a 900-square-meter garden that feels like it was lifted from the French countryside and dropped into the 18th arrondissement.
The building dates to the 19th century, when it sat on the last remnants of the Maquis scrubland above Paris.
The Hermès family owned it for a stretch. It became a hotel in 2007, with five suites, each designed by a different artist.
The suite names set the tone of the place: “Lazy Leopardesses,” “Grand Tralala,” “Les Folies du Ciel.”
It is sometimes called the French Château Marmont. The garden has actual chickens and rabbits wandering through it. An American guest writes: “You would never know that you were in the middle of Paris. It’s a tranquil oasis.”
Suites run from €655 a night in 2026, with the larger prestige suite at €755. The bar, Le Très Particulier, takes walk-in guests and has a speakeasy below it.
Several travelers mention the bar as the best thing they found in Paris on that trip.
Oscar Wilde’s Final Bill
Oscar Wilde arrived at what is now L’Hôtel in 1900, at a point when the building was a run-down Left Bank pension called the Hôtel d’Alsace. He was 46, broke, and sick.
He died there in November of that year. He told a friend he was “dying beyond his means.” His final bill went unpaid. The hotel framed it and hung it in Room 16.
The property is now a five-star boutique hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 20 rooms designed by Jacques Garcia in rich red velvets and baroque detail.
The MICHELIN Guide calls it “a boutique hotel before the concept of a boutique hotel had even been invented.”
Below the building there is a private underground pool carved into the stone, along with a hammam. The restaurant holds a Michelin star. Thursday evenings bring jazz to the bar.
Anthony Bourdain said L’Hôtel was the only place in Paris he would stay. A traveler writes: “If it was good enough for Wilde and Bourdain then it’s good enough for you. Quiet, attentive, with the elegance of a time long gone by.”
Rooms in the smallest Mignon category start around $400 a night. The Oscar Wilde suite runs around $747.
The rooms themselves are small, worth knowing before you book. The underground pool and the framed bill on the wall in Room 16 aren’t.
Bar Hemingway and Chanel’s Bedroom
The Ritz Paris has been at 15 Place Vendôme since 1898. Coco Chanel moved into suite 302 in 1937.
She had an apartment above her boutique at 31 rue Cambon, a 30-second walk across the street, and she used it as a workspace.
The Ritz is where she slept, received guests, dined with Dalí and Jean Cocteau, and eventually died, in January 1971.
She had been there for 34 years. She called it “ma maison.”
The Ritz redesigned the suite as suite 202 after a four-year renovation completed in 2016, working closely with the House of Chanel to preserve the atmosphere she created.
The Coromandel lacquer screens, the proportions, the feel of a private apartment rather than a hotel room.
Ernest Hemingway also fell for the Ritz as a penniless writer in Paris in the 1920s. On August 25, 1944, the day the city was liberated, he arrived by jeep with a group of Resistance fighters, walked in, and announced he was there to personally liberate the bar.
He ordered champagne for everyone. The small bar off the Rue Cambon entrance has carried his name ever since.
There are 71 rooms and 71 suites in total, with 15 named after famous guests: Fitzgerald, Proust, Chopin, Chaplin, Chanel.
Standard rooms start above $4,000 a night. The hotel has a dress code and will enforce it.
Bar Hemingway is open to the public. Cocktails run around €30. The head barman, Colin Field, has been behind the bar long enough that regulars now come as much for him as for the history.