Hôtel Shangri-La Paris: Princely Palace

Prince Roland Bonaparte, born in 1858, was the grandnephew of Napoleon I and cousin to Napoleon III. An inveterate traveler, he was a passionate student of geography, geology and especially botany, amassing an astonishing private herbarium containing some 300,000 samples of herbs and ferns. He married Marie-Félix Blanc, the heiress to the Société des Bains de Mer hotels and casinos of Monte Carlo. In 1892 he commissioned the architect Ernest Janty to build a palatial home on a huge plot of land he had acquired on the Avenue d’Iéna—named after one of his great-uncle’s victorious battles—on the small hill of Chaillot, across the Seine from Gustave Eiffel’s new tower, built three years earlier. The Palais d’Iéna was completed in 1896—a vast mansion in an “eclectic” blend of 17th- and 19th-century styles.

The Shangri-La Suite

The Bauhinia restaurant

A duplex suite

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Completely restored and renovated, the princely residence has just reopened as the Shangri-La Paris, the latest link in the Hong Kong-based Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts chain. It’s the second of three new ultra-luxurious Asian hotels suddenly stealing the scene from the city’s historic palace hotels (themselves almost all now Asian and Middle-Eastern owned), after the just-opened Royal Monceau Raffles Paris, of the Singapore-based Raffles chain, and before the Mandarin Oriental Paris, slated to open later this year—French-owned but operated by the Mandarin Oriental Group of Hong Kong.

The polar opposite of the hip, flashy and wildly contemporary Royal Monceau designed by Philippe Starck, the new Shangri-La is a deep-pile bastion of classic “luxe, calme et volupté” designed and decorated by Pierre-Yves Rochon. From the imposing entrance behind grilled gates to the marble lobby with its tall painted-glass windows and sweeping grand staircase, the ground floor is much as it was when first built. Off the lobby, the original wood-paneled sitting room, billiard room and smoking room are now cozy salons. Upstairs, the original reception rooms, ballroom and private apartments have been listed as historic monuments and meticulously restored to their gilded grandeur.

With successive owners over the years, three floors were added to the original mansion. On these upper floors, more than half of the hotel’s 54 rooms and 27 suites have views of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine, and nearly half have private balconies. Almost all are decorated in blue, white and ecru, in a mix of sumptuous fabrics, silk-threaded wallpapers and thick carpets. Custom-made furnishings are complemented by lovely artworks and antiques, including Asian porcelain vases and lacquered cabinets. Big flat TV screens are so discreet they are almost unnoticeable—and small TV screens are even imbedded in wall-sized bathroom mirrors.

At the top, the immense rooftop Shangri-La Suite has floor-to-ceiling glass walls giving onto a 1,000-square-foot terrace with panoramic views of nearly the entire Parisian cityscape, with the Eiffel Tower in the center, directly across the river.

Beneath a glass cupola, the Bauhinia restaurant, named after the exotic orchid-like flower on the Hong Kong flag, has a mezzanine balcony with a cast-iron and crystal railing. Like the bar, a tented Empire-style Napoleonic fantasy, the Bauhinia is already a Parisian rendezvous. Still to come in 2011, the French haute cuisine restaurant L’Abeille, named for the symbolic Bonaparte bee, and the gourmet Cantonese restaurant Shang Palace. Also slated for later this year, a garden by celebrated landscape designer Louis Benech, and the swimming pool and spa, installed in the former Bonaparte stables.

10 ave d’Iéna, 16th, 01.53.67.19.98. Doubles start at €750. website

Originally published in the February 2011 issue of France Today

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