Midnight is drawing close at the Ritz Paris's Bar Vendôme, and Princess Firyal of Jordan is having a grasshopper nightcap. It is a period cocktail and this, in a sense, is a period bar. Which period? That depends on how many you've had.
In conversation, the princess mentioned that earlier in the day she had spotted her friend Barry Diller bolting through the lobby on the way to catch a plane. She was not alone in having seen the internet mogul, who was dressed as if he were planning to mow a lawn. He struck a somewhat discordant note amid all the liveried staff, concierges in tailcoats, and pages in pillbox hats.
But one accepts, at this point, that decorum has pretty much gone the way of the dodo, killed off by Snapchat and athleisure wear. The time when grownups wore outerwear in public and even gloves and hats in town, when they made an effort to put on the Ritz—particularly in the lobbies of the grand hotels that long stood as epitomes of civilized living—now seems far off.
Then again, perhaps those days are staging a return. In that largely bygone world it was expected that a princess, say, or a self-made American fracking magnate, or a Bolivian guano tycoon, for that matter—anyone with the money for the tariff at the Ritz Paris or a drink at the Bar Vendôme—would rise to the privilege of finding him- or herself in a storied setting like this one, and in a hostelry whose name itself became, over more than a century, a byword for luxury.
Take the princess of Jordan. Though casually dressed for an evening with friends, she is wearing a dress from the haute couture. Her honeyed coiffure is impeccably in place. Her jewels—a princess never travels without them—include a chalcedony parure and a knuckle-duster from the irascible Bronx-born jeweler Joel Arthur Rosenthal, styled JAR.
Although the peripatetic royal possesses numerous houses, including one in Paris, she eagerly joined the mobs pressing through the hotel’s gilded doors one week this past summer for the reopening of a hotel—long a bolt-hole for movie stars and mistresses, politicians and pettish supermodels, sheikhs and oligarchs—that had for the past four years been shuttered for renovation.
It was time for a change, said those familiar with the Ritz Paris, a fashionable bivouac, yet one which had drifted on its storied reputation toward a kind of gilded desuetude. For about the same stratospheric rates the Ritz was charging, visitors to Paris could increasingly find lodging at a variety of new luxury properties, places like the nearby Mandarin Oriental on the rue St-Honoré. What spanking-new five-stars like that one lacked in the way of patina they compensated for with such modern conveniences as reliable plumbing, working elevators, and adequate electrical outlets.
To be sure, closing the Ritz Paris completely for the first time in its then 114-year history was risky, general manager Christian A. Boyens said at the time. It was also necessary if the palace hotel were to survive into another century. “In a sense, we didn’t have a choice,’’ Mr. Boyens told me in the week before the hotel was shuttered. It was a sentiment he echoed when we met again after the hotel finally reopened in June.
Though preternaturally confident and ebullient, Mr. Boyens was clearly feeling the strain of the long-awaited debut, one that had been delayed three months by a multi-alarm fire in January which left a hole in the roof of the wing on the rue Cambon side and damaged an entire block of newly renovated rooms.
“The fire itself was not a big deal,’’ Mr. Boyens explained over iced tea one afternoon in the Bar Vendôme (its former open-air terrace is now a kind of chic terrarium with a seasonally retractable glass roof). “It was really the water that damaged the rooms and suites.’’
The rush to open with some rooms still under construction owed in part to a desire to hit the hotel’s anniversary. (When the Ritz debuted in June 1898, it was the most advanced of the world’s great luxury lodgings, with telephones and private baths in every room.) Equally, the pressure was to ready the place for the arrival of its most loyal cohort, members of the fashion flock. Descending en masse six times each year for the ready-to-wear and haute couture shows, they proved themselves true to form when—like the swallows of Capistrano—they swooped in, packing nearly all 98 of the hotel’s available rooms.
There was Thom Browne, the American designer, encamped for a week in a suite with his partner, Andrew Bolton, who, as curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, oversees the Anna Wintour Costume Center. There was Ms. Wintour herself, explaining to a reporter that, while she missed the hotel’s creaky old limed-oak elevator, she was “glad to be back.’’ There, too, were such other Ritz loyalists as Amanda Harlech, a creative consultant to Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, and also Robert Rabensteiner, the handsome, bearded L’Uomo Vogue editor perennially named to best-dressed lists, trailed by the perma-tanned Italian fashion eminence Anna Dello Russo.
And there, in the long marble lobby restored by the French architect Thierry W. Despont to something very like its former antique glory—brighter in color now, airier, with both its austere Louis XVI–style furniture and the sofas and chairs in the haute-bourgeois style of Louis Philippe plumped and stuffed—was the hotel’s proprietor, the octogenarian Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, surveying the scene from his customary armchair.
It was Mr. Al Fayed who put up $442.6 million to renovate an aging structure originally cobbled together from an 18th-century palace and its surrounding buildings. It was he, too, who substantially underwrote the restoration and lighting of the Vendôme Column, a Napoleonic war monument jutting from the center of a square outside the hotel like a paradoxical exclamation point punctuating a thoroughfare whose name in English translates as Street of Peace.
For all the years I have visited the hotel, Mr. Al Fayed has sat in that chair in that same spot in the lobby. Inevitably merry and amused, he is oddly approachable, once you get past the bodyguards.
I know because I went up to him to offer congratulations and was warmly greeted; he even treated me to what looked like a Tic Tac shed from a trouser pocket. “Here, take this,’’ said Mr. Al Fayed. “Egyptian Viagra.’’
If the Ritz Paris is, as some claim, the billionaire’s most prized possession, it is also possible it is one he is ready to part with. While cheering the handsome new formal garden, a new underground ballroom, a new Chanel spa, a tunnel linking the hotel to its underground parking garage for guests wishing to avoid the lenses of paparazzi, a largely sensitive restoration of the hotel’s paneled and gilded (and, in some cases, socially protected) interiors, and the modernization of systems like wiring, plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning, some guests wondered whether Mr. Al Fayed had leaned so hard on the deadline in order to ready the Ritz Paris for sale.
As if to underscore those theories, there one afternoon was the general manager, Mr. Boyens, conducting a private tour of the place and its newly installed marble gallery (containing five shops and 91 vitrines filled with goods from Prada, Armani, and the like), its serene garden, even the sixth-floor suites, for Bernard Arnault and his pianist wife, Hélène. (In an email, a spokesperson for the hotel denied that the Ritz Paris is on the market.) Mr. Arnault, of course, is the 67-year-old CEO and chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. I happened to bump into this exploratory party as it progressed down a long, carpeted hallway on one of the guest floors and nodded politely, as one might, to the richest man in France.
Afterward, I began to wonder whether Mr. Arnault had gotten wind of the complaints voiced by some early guests. The telephone system, they reported, was full of glitches, making one long for the days when the Ritz Paris switchboard was run by a heavy-smoking operator with a voice like a rake dragged over gravel. And while it was not entirely the case that, as Mr. Diller remarked, “nothing works” at the hotel, it was true that suits sent for cleaning by the American billionaire Leon Black were temporarily waylaid.
Firsthand experience also showed that door handles fell off in one’s hand. Gilded sconces slumped off freshly painted walls. A glass-walled elevator installed to replace the charming, though notoriously tetchy, wood-paneled one of Ms. Wintour’s fond recollection turned out to be as crotchety as the original.
Happily, much that was irreplaceably characteristic of the old Ritz Paris is preserved. The thick peach-hued bath towels hang again from heated towel racks in modern bathrooms. Gilded swan taps on baths and sinks are back. Silk tulip lampshades shade the original lamps. The key-shaped light switches are in place, as are the porcelain pulls dangling in the bath for summoning a valet or maid. At the same time, mirrors in the bathrooms are now inset with hidden televisions, and the wireless internet connection is powerful and free, still unusual in twenty-first-century Europe.
These are all minor elements of a story that is after all much larger than the Ritz Paris. It is one involving the battered psyche of an entire populace. Paris has been in desperate need of a morale booster in the prolonged aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2015 and following a season of biblical rains.
And, while it is a lot to expect of a hotel that by reopening it might single-handedly lighten the somber mood burdening the City of Light, the return of the Ritz Paris has provided a definite lift to Parisians’ bruised civic pride. “César Ritz had the dream and you brought it back to life,’’ a high-ranking local official remarked to Mr. Al Fayed at a private cocktail reception I attended in the new 21,500-square-foot garden.
Mr. Al Fayed was seated with his Finnish wife, Heini, at a café table in this serene space—a garden less Parisian, perhaps, than Beverly Hills—set amid the two dozen linden trees and beds of white roses planted by the landscape architect Jean Mus. The official’s formulation was rote, perhaps, yet the core of her observation held true. With its honeyed sandstone facade scoured and restored, its scrolled ironwork gates burnished and glistening with gold leaf, its trademark blue enamel plaques installed on the facade beneath a mansard roofline, the long-shuttered hotel has resumed its rightful position on a square that is actually an octagon and that counts immutably among the most elegant public spaces in the world.
“Even the smell is the same!’’ Carine Roitfeld, the former French Vogue editor, seasoned stylist, and emblem of French chic, said of the hotel, throughout which floats a signature heady amber essence. To observe Ms. Roitfeld teetering across the lobby one day in her trademark pencil skirt and stilettos, hair falling over dark-rimmed eyes, was to feel like an extra onstage in a great urban theater.
As she made her way past the book-lined, limed-oak walls of the hotel’s new Salon Proust, Ms. Roitfeld had about her an air less reminiscent of the enervated aristocrats and aesthetes of Swann’s Way than of the urgently driven worldly types encountered more often in Balzac.
It is these energetic strivers, after all, who breathe life into places like the Ritz Paris, their fresh energy an antidote to the deadly complacency of settled hereditary societies. Coco Chanel and Ernest Hemingway are two most obvious examples of this; spend five minutes at the Ritz Paris and you are sure to hear some story about the self-mythologizing couturiere, who spent 34 years in residence there, or the boozy macho scribe from Oak Park, Illinois.
By now, Hemingway’s aphorisms about the Ritz are so well rehearsed as to resemble ad copy. For sheer inanity, a personal favorite is the Nobel Prize–winning novelist’s observation that the only reason not to stay at the Ritz when in Paris is “if you can’t afford it.’’
There are plenty of others just as dopey and I enjoy them all. It tickles me to consider the ways in which a poor girl from the French sticks and an ambitious, posturing middle-class Midwesterner helped sell the world on the quintessentially Gallic appeal of an establishment that was, in fact, created by a clever Swiss hotelier. Hemingway and Chanel did a lot to create and uphold the Ritz Paris’s image of luxurious French hospitality, one that survived two wars, an economic crash, a partial and then a full renovation, a devastating fire, assorted terrorist threats, and also Johnny Depp.
Through it all, the hotel has managed to sustain its aura of luxe and the sincerity of its value proposition. Of course, the moneyed guests of places like the Ritz Paris expect to be cosseted: At those prices, they ought to be. What is more important to those people, though—and to this reporter—is the assurance of finding at the Ritz Paris something ineffably familiar and constant. In that sense, the new Ritz remains fundamentally the old.
We curated a playlist that conjures a bygone era of the Ritz Paris, when Hemingway could be found sitting in the smoke-filled bar and jazz filled the city's streets: