Past Forward

Freshly restored, the world’s most historic luxury hotel makes a comeback. Shivani Vora checks-in for a sip of elegance.

- Shivani Vora

When I dream of afterlife in heaven,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote in a letter to his friend and fellow writer A.E. Hotchner, “the action always takes place in the Paris Ritz.”

It’s been awhile, but the Ritz is back in action.

After a renovation that kept its doors shut for nearly four years, the Ritz Paris opened recently, 118 years after it first opened on June 1, 1898. But, this was almost three months later than intended, because of a fire at the property in January.

Historic hotels and stories of their renovations don’t always make for original ink, but the Ritz Paris, on the Place Vendôme in the city’s first arrondissement, is more storied than most.

When the Swiss hotelier César Ritz bought the property—then the Hôtel de Lazun, but originally a private palace constructed in the early 18th century—he did so with visions of opening the most luxurious hotel in the world. It should have, he is said to have declared, “all the refinement that a prince could desire in his own home.”

And, indeed, with every guest room equipped with its own bathroom, an unheard-of amenity then, the Ritz seemed to instantly attract high society. Which prominent names were regulars? Maybe the better question to ask is, which ones were not? The cadre of famous names with an affinity for the Ritz throughout its existence included Marcel Proust, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Coco Chanel, who lived there for 34 years, from 1937 to 1971. 

But, even the best hotels wear with age.