Few hotels anywhere have made a single colour do as much work as the crimson awnings, geranium window boxes, and scarlet-trimmed bed throws that define the street presence and interior signature of Hotel Plaza Athénée. Situated on Avenue Montaigne since 1911, the property was built by architect Jules Lefebvre in the Haussmann tradition — cream limestone, wrought-iron balustrades, arched ground-floor arcades — and its facade has remained essentially unchanged, a fixed point in Paris's most fashion-saturated quarter. The 188 rooms and suites were refreshed under the direction of Marie-José Pommereau, whose approach kept the language of Second Empire domesticity intact: deep-coffered boiserie, crystal chandeliers, Louis XVI fauteuils upholstered in damask, gilt console tables set against pale grey boiserie panels. The inner courtyard, entirely consumed by Virginia creeper climbing five stories of dressed stone, functions as an open-air dining room in warmer months, its limestone paving and cast-iron garden chairs framed by olive trees and clipped topiary. The tension the hotel navigates with particular skill is between the earnestly classical and the decidedly contemporary. In the bar — known as Bar Classique — Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku of Jouin Manku have installed a sculpted, back-lit resin counter whose fluid, almost molten form sits deliberately against the dark boiserie panelling and Gothic arched windows surrounding it, a cobalt ceiling installation amplifying the collision. The guestroom palette stays committed to champagne, ivory, and deep crimson throughout, the patterned Savonnerie-style carpets and draped silk curtains maintaining a register closer to a well-appointed private apartment than a hotel room.

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