Le Monceau Nouveau

There’s nothing like Paris in the ’20s. Except maybe Paris in the ’50s. And the whole 20th century, and the better part of the 19th. It was the place to be for anyone interested in making art or talking about making art, for jazz, for poetry, for stumbling into genius casually and frequently. From 1928 on, there was a singular hotel at the center of it all: Le Royal Monceau.


As soon as its doors opened, Le Royal Monceau was a fixture of the scene, a favorite haunt of artists and intellectuals, Parisians and visitors. A French general might cross paths with the likes of Josephine Baker or Ernest Hemingway. Walt Disney, Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier were frequent visitors. But after nearly a hundred years, Le Royal Monceau (and would it be unfair to say Paris, too?) had lost its edge.

A new century was the impetus for a little gussying up. The hotel closed for a two-year renovation to reopen late in 2010, introducing a new look from Philippe Starck and an ambitious artistic program to reclaim its cornerstone position in one of the world’s cultural capitals.

In the reinvention of Le Royal Monceau, art is as important as ever — and this is something its new operators will not let you forget. There is hardly an inch of space that wasn’t commissioned from one artist or another. In the garden, there’s a wiry sculpture of a teapot by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, and Stéphane Calais’s murals cover the ceiling of La Cuisine, one of the hotel’s restaurants. In the rooms and suites hang photographs that are anything but stock, and that’s if they hang at all. Some rest on bookshelves or on tabletops in the kind of undone, lived-in style that is becoming signature Starck.

But the hotel’s approach to art is not just a hither and thither kind of thing. Curator Hervé Mikaeloff has been enlisted to oversee all the programming, which is no small task given just how sweeping its agenda is: beyond the rooms and the public spaces, there is the Librairie des Arts, a contemporary art bookstore with its own curator (Marie de Jaacquelot), where you can find limited edition books, exhibition catalogues, prints and funky stuff designed by artists and architects like Zaha Hadid and Takeshi Kitano. The materialiste will also be pleased to know about Le Royal Eclaireur, a new fashion and design concept store inside the hotel. There you can pick up a Rick Owens jacket for an evening out, or more likely, an evening in entailing a screening a Le Cinema des Lumières, their 100-seat theater, and dinner at Il Carpaccio. To tend to needs beyond the hotel — those few that remain, that is — there’s an art concierge, who can draw up an itinerary of the best shows, auctions and art-centric events in town and make sure your experience is nothing less than first-rate.

Finally, to drive the concept home, this month the hotel opened up its Art District, an in-house noncommercial gallery. Mikaeloff has planned to feature four shows a year, the first of which is “Feast of Trimalchio,” a photography and video exhibition from the Moscow-based collective AES+F. The series is a fantastic interpretation of the Satyricon, the Roman novel by Petronius, a contemporary of Nero. The artists have re-imagined Trimalchio’s obscenely decadent dinner party, set, this time, in a luxury hotel — rather apt given the context.

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