InterContinental Paris Le Grand

On 5 May 1862 the Empress Eugénie came to rue Scribe to inaugurate a hotel that had taken fifteen months to build and that faced a building site: the new opera house would not be finished until 1875. The Grand Hôtel, now InterContinental Paris Le Grand, was the largest hotel in Paris at its opening and a piece of Haussmann's city, built by the Pereire brothers as part of their development of the boulevards around the Opéra.

History

The Pereire brothers, bankers to the Second Empire, commissioned the architect Alfred Armand, who had already built their Grand Hôtel du Louvre in 1855. The building occupied an entire block between the boulevard des Capucines, rue Scribe and rue Auber, with around 800 rooms, hydraulic lifts and a telegraph office, the modern equipment of the time. The Café de la Paix opened at the corner of the boulevard the same year and became a fixture of Paris life.

The hotel passed through the great Paris hotel companies of the twentieth century and was taken over by InterContinental, which has run it for several decades. A large restoration completed in 2003 renewed the rooms and the public rooms and gave the hotel its present name. The Café de la Paix and the Salon Opéra are listed as historic monuments in their own right.

Architecture and design

Armand's building is Second Empire Paris at full scale: a long stone elevation on the boulevard, rusticated base, continuous balconies and a mansard roof. The lobby leads to La Verrière, the glass-roofed inner courtyard that Armand planned as a winter garden and that now serves as a lounge and restaurant. The Salon Opéra, the ballroom, is a Napoleon III room with a painted ceiling and a glass dome, listed and still used for its original purpose.

The Café de la Paix keeps its gilded ceilings and columns in the style of the opera house opposite, and its terrace on the boulevard des Capucines is among the most photographed in Paris.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has about 470 rooms and suites, a large count for central Paris, in the classical register of the 2003 restoration. Rooms on the place de l'Opéra side look straight at the Palais Garnier, and a number of top-floor suites have terraces facing the opera house.

Dining

The Café de la Paix is the hotel's restaurant and one of the city's oldest, serving all day from breakfast to late supper, with the terrace on the boulevard. La Verrière, under the glass roof of the courtyard, serves breakfast and lunch and afternoon tea. There is a bar in the lobby. The hotel's pastry has a long reputation at the Café de la Paix.

Wellness

A spa with treatment rooms and a fitness centre occupy the lower floors. There is no swimming pool.

Weddings and events

Few Paris hotels can seat as many guests under one historic roof. The Salon Opéra is the main ballroom, used for galas, weddings and conferences, and the hotel has a series of further salons on the same floor, several named after Second Empire figures, for meetings and dinners. The hotel is a regular venue for congresses and company meetings because of the room count and the scale of the ballroom. Exact capacities per room are not in our source material.

Location

The hotel is on place de l'Opéra in the 9th arrondissement, with the Palais Garnier across the square, the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps behind it on boulevard Haussmann, and place Vendôme a few minutes' walk south. Métro and RER Opéra and Auber are at the door; the Roissybus to Paris-Charles de Gaulle leaves from rue Scribe. For a luxury hotel in Paris it is unusually well placed for trains, with Saint-Lazare station five hundred metres away.