Standing in the lobby of Le Royal Monceau on Avenue Hoche one afternoon in October 2010, Philippe Starck surveyed the forest of original chandeliers he had clustered above the main staircase. Gilles Jacob, then president of the Cannes Film Festival, had just declared the hotel's 99-seat cinema "the best private cinema in Europe." Starck pointed to a single red seat among the white ones. "Why red?" someone asked. "Because it makes people ask why," he said.
The hotel opened in 1928, the creation of Pierre Bermond and André Jugnot, two hoteliers who had already built the Carlton in Paris and the Miramar in Cannes. The location they chose sat minutes from the Arc de Triomphe, on a street named after Louis Lazare Hoche, a general of the French Revolution who died at 29. Paris in 1928 was deep in what Parisians still call the Années folles. Josephine Baker performed at the Folies Bergère. Coco Chanel had just introduced her little black dress. Ernest Hemingway, who claimed to despise the rich, spent considerable time among them at the Royal Monceau.
The architect Louis Duhayon designed the façade in Renaissance Revival style. The hotel drew the Maharajas of Indore and Kashmir, King Farouk of Egypt, the Aga Khan. Walt Disney stayed there. So did Ray Charles.
Notable Guests Through the Decades
In the summer of 1946, two men occupied rooms on consecutive floors. David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, had come to Paris after "Black Saturday," when the British arrested 3,000 Jews in Palestine. Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese revolutionary, was attending the Fontainebleau Conference to negotiate independence from France. Ben-Gurion's room was directly below Ho Chi Minh's. They met every day for two weeks.
Ben-Gurion later told the Israeli journalist Shmuel Segev that he could gauge the progress of Ho Chi Minh's negotiations by the length of the red carpet in front of his room. "He gave people the impression of being a lovable person," Ben-Gurion said, "a nationalist leader, fighting for the national independence of his people." A few hours before Ho Chi Minh left Paris, he came to Ben-Gurion's room looking tired. "There was nothing left but to fight," he said. Within months, the First Indochina War began.
Two years later, Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir signed documents related to the newly created State of Israel inside the hotel. The building had been requisitioned during the German occupation, then served as Allied headquarters after the Liberation. General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery stayed there. Winston Churchill, who claimed he was easy to please because he was always "satisfied with the best," was a guest.
Winston Churchill, who claimed he was easy to please because he was always "satisfied with the best," was a guest.
By 2007, the hotel had passed through several owners. The Syrian businessman Osman Aidi held it from 1978 to 2007. Qatari Diar, the real estate subsidiary of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, acquired the property for 250 million euros. The fund transferred management to Katara Hospitality in 2011. Alexandre Allard, the developer, commissioned Starck to gut the interior.
Starck studied at the École Nissim de Camondo in Paris. His father was an aeronautics engineer. "For me, that made invention a duty," Starck has said. In 1968, he started a company producing inflatable objects. In 1976, he founded Starck Product, later renamed Ubik. Pierre Cardin hired him as artistic director. In 1982, François Mitterrand commissioned him to redesign the private apartments of the Élysée Palace.
The Royal Monceau closed in June 2008. A demolition party was held. All the furniture went to auction. Starck reduced the room count from 260 to 149. He added an art gallery, a bookstore in the reception area, and a 23-meter underground swimming pool beneath the courtyard. The pool has a glass ceiling that floods the space with daylight. At either end, backlit curtains create the illusion of windows.
The Starck Transformation
Some windows appear to be stained glass but are actually stickers, a reference to a convent that once stood on the site.
Every room contains a guitar. "For no other reason than you might wish to play it," Starck said.
Under glass on each desk sits an annotated map of Paris showing Starck's favorite places.
Letters from the Cocteau-Malraux correspondence, belonging to the owner, appear beside each bed. Guests have to crouch to read them.
The headboards in every room stand some distance from the wall. Why? "Because Philippe Starck likes that," one hotel employee said.
In 2013, the French government awarded Le Royal Monceau the "Palace" distinction, making it one of only 13 hotels in France to hold the title. The designation requires 24-hour multilingual concierge service, a spa, multiple restaurants, and rooms of at least 30 square meters.
Culinary Excellence
Nobu Matsuhisa chose the hotel in 2016 for his first restaurant in France. The kitchen is supervised by Chef Emanuele Bombardier. Il Carpaccio, the Italian restaurant, earned a Michelin star in 2022. In 2024, the Italian ranking system 50 Top Italy named it the best Italian restaurant in the world outside Italy. The chefs Oliver Piras and Alessandra Del Favero run it in partnership with the Da Vittorio family.
The Art Concierge is Julie Eugène. The hotel maintains a private collection of more than 300 works. Guests can request sculptures, photographs, or sketches for their rooms during their stay.
Ivette Fuentes, a physicist at the University of Southampton who has stayed at the hotel, called the design "playful but not frivolous." She noted that Starck's renovations preserved the 1928 window fixtures while removing nearly everything else. "He kept the bones," she said.
Adrian Mourby, writing for Famous Hotels, observed that the Royal Monceau "definitely works in theory." He was referring to an old joke about French and British consultants. The French team throws up its hands at a British solution: "Yes, that is all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?"
Starck has said his approach to hotels differs from decoration. "It has to do with an exploration," he said. "The exploration of what is, of what should, of what could be the French spirit."
Katara Hospitality now owns 42 hotels across four continents. The company was founded in 1970 as Qatar National Hotels Limited. It rebranded in 2012. The name derives from "Catara," a spelling used by ancient cartographers for the Qatar Peninsula. Sheikh Nawaf bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani serves as chairman.
The Royal Monceau employs between 450 and 600 people depending on the season. A night in a standard room costs upward of 900 euros. The hotel sits 45 minutes from Charles de Gaulle Airport by car, 15 minutes from Gare du Nord.
Starck, who turned 76 in January, continues to work. In 2024, he unveiled a motorhome for the Alpine Formula 1 team at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza. In October of the same year, he opened LA Almazara in Ronda, Spain, the first olive oil mill designed by an internationally known designer. Time magazine included it in its list of the World's Greatest Places of 2025.
Le Royal Monceau, minutes from the Arc de Triomphe