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PROFILES PARIS’ PENINSULA HOTEL


The Peninsula Paris’ spectacular lobby—a wedding- cake-white lounge adorned with mouldings, gold leaf and paintings meticulously patched up by some of France’s top artisans—gives a hint of the enormity of the hotel’s renovation project. The sheer scale of the restoration work is why the hotel took twice as long to renovate as it did to construct. This time around the stakes were far higher. Asia’s


oldest luxury hospitality brand, Peninsula Hotels is legendarily picky about locations. And not only is this the company’s first property in Europe, it follows recent Parisian openings by Asian rivals Mandarin Oriental, Raffles and Shangri-La. In October, just two months after its opening, the wait


and expense already seem worth it; occupancies are nudging 80 percent, and there is a three-month wait for a table in its Eiffel Tower-nuzzling rooftop restaurant. On a rainy Tuesday, the lounge is buzzy as glossy guests and slick staff glide through the morning ballet of meetings and refreshments.


Everything seems as reassuringly solid and permanent as the Arc de Triomphe, visible from the terrace. Yet the hotel’s unflappable director, Vincent Pimont,


still gives the impression that he touches every surface he is about to sit on in case it is still wet. “It has been a long journey to get here,” he winces. “The challenge from the start was enormous. Basically we had to restore the architectural and design integrity of a late 19th-Century classic French- style building from scratch. At the same time, we had to integrate modern facilities, state-of-the-art technology and everything else that guests would expect from a Peninsula.” Restoring the building to its former splendour was a colossal undertaking, says Pimont. The building first opened in 1908 as one of Paris’ most celebrated “grands hotels”. Following the wartime occupation of Paris, the hotel was converted into UNESCO’s headquarters in 1946, and in 1958 it became the conference centre for the French Ministry


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