We stayed in one of the sixth-floor suites, refurbished by young designers Margaux Lally and Luc Berger of Lally & Berger. Le Meurice’s rooms and suites vary in size and grandeur – all echoing to some degree the 18th-century spirit governing the ground floor. It’s the communal ground-floor spaces especially that ooze Imperial French splendour with impossibly high ceilings, original cornicing and mosaic floors – the perfect canvas for Philippe Starck’s fabulously jarring modernity (note his daughter, Ara Starck's Dalí-inspired sweeping ceiling art in the Restaurant Le Dalí and his transparent plastic chairs spread across the decadent Restaurant Le Meurice Alain Ducasse). The hotel’s splendid Haussmann façade looks out across the Tuileries gardens, with a sweeping panoramic view from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower, and a bejewelled Louis XIV wall peacock inside. Paris’ first ‘palace-status hotel’, Le Meurice is a gilded city spin on Versailles – an ornate refuge from the rue Rivoli crowds with a rich history that gives its grandiose neighbours, Le Crillon and the Ritz, a run for their money. All very coherent and discreetly sensuous. There are deft touches everywhere – the bedside tables with tops as rich and glossy as a crème caramel the autumnal tones of the curtains the contoured eau-de-nil tiles in the bathrooms the ongoing juxtaposition of straight and curved lines that you find throughout the hotel. (This applies even in the littlest rooms, which are indeed little). Style-wise, rooms are similarly got-up in a way that is at once spartan and spoiling, chic and subdued. There’s charm in all directions though, à tous les étages. Ask for a room on the sixth, seventh or eighth floor, on the Rue Suger side, with a terrace. I sometimes think about leaving Paris, but the thing that prevents me is the rooftops.” Of the 109 rooms, the higher up you are, the better the views get – or rather the bigger they get. When this reviewer described the stupendous panorama to a Paris-born-and-bred friend, she sighed and said simply: “ Oui. If your faith in Paris is flagging – which does happen but seldom lasts – a visit to the rooftop of Hôtel Dame des Arts will restore it. On a clear day, you can see practically the entire city. The 360-degree views from the rooftop bar alone are a reason to book.
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