Why you should experience Cheval Blanc Paris in Paris, France.
Cheval Blanc Paris is a sumptuous luxury hotel where Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois's mercantile inheritance, Art Deco craftsmanship, contemporary creative ambition and Seine-facing grandeur converge within Henri Sauvage's 1928 Samaritaine architecture.
Set along Quai du Louvre near Rue de la Monnaie and just steps from Pont Neuf, the 72-room Maison occupies the restored Art Deco building that Sauvage designed for La Samaritaine, with architect Peter Marino transforming its interiors into the atmosphere of a private Parisian residence. Marino commissioned bespoke furniture and assembled works by Vik Muniz, Sonia Delaunay, Philippe Anthonioz and Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, while Frank Gehry created a horse specifically for the Maison and Sophie Mallebranche produced the grand woven-metal staircase extending from the entrance toward Dior Spa Cheval Blanc. Artist Ingrid Donat continued the Art Deco discussion through gilded-bronze openwork panels positioned above Spiderman marble flooring. The result is a hotel where Sauvage, Marino, Gehry, Mallebranche and Donat turn the architectural history of La Samaritaine into an unusually concentrated expression of contemporary French craftsmanship.
What you should know about Cheval Blanc Paris.
Cheval Blanc Paris is best known for opening in 2021 within Henri Sauvage's 1928 Art Deco Samaritaine building after architect Peter Marino conceived a 72-room Maison containing 46 rooms and 26 suites, including ten suites with direct Seine views, around the intimacy of a private Parisian apartment. The architectural project preserved Sauvage's historic envelope while restoration architect Édouard François coordinated marble workers, gilders, ironworkers and specialist craftspeople across its revival, allowing Marino's contemporary interiors to operate inside one of La Samaritaine's defining twentieth-century structures. Art was embedded throughout the concept, with Frank Gehry commissioned to create a sculptural horse specifically for the Maison, Sophie Mallebranche producing the woven-metal staircase connecting the entrance with Dior Spa Cheval Blanc, and Ingrid Donat creating gilded-bronze openwork panels above Spiderman marble. Marino extended the collection through paintings by Vik Muniz and Sonia Delaunay and works by Philippe Anthonioz and Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, making modernist and contemporary art inseparable from the hotel's architectural vocabulary. Cheval Blanc Paris consequently emerged as an unusually authored LVMH hospitality project in which Sauvage's 1928 architecture, Marino's residential interiors and site-specific commissions operate as parts of the same composition.
Chef Arnaud Donckele develops that authorship through Plénitude, where his cuisine earned three MICHELIN stars immediately in the 2022 Guide, making the restaurant one of only two new French establishments elevated directly to three stars that year. Donckele, already three-starred at La Vague d'Or in Saint-Tropez, constructs his Paris cuisine around sauces treated with the precision of perfume compositions, connecting his native Normandy, adopted Mediterranean landscape and Île-de-France through jus, vinaigrettes and complex aromatic sequences. Pastry chef Maxime Frédéric, previously at Four Seasons Hotel George V, directs the sweet program alongside Donckele, with MICHELIN separately recognizing his work as a distinctive component of the Plénitude experience. Donckele's culinary direction extends to MICHELIN-starred Le Tout-Paris and Hakuba with Japanese chef Takuya Watanabe, creating three separate restaurant identities within the Maison rather than concentrating its gastronomic ambition in a single dining room. Together, Arnaud Donckele, Maxime Frédéric, Takuya Watanabe and Peter Marino sustain the same principle established by Sauvage's architecture: Cheval Blanc Paris treats cuisine, art, interiors and craftsmanship as individually authored disciplines within one coherent house.
How to fold Cheval Blanc Paris into your trip.
Cheval Blanc Paris works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the architectural invention, artistic patronage and royal urban ambition concentrated around the oldest crossings of Central Paris.
Begin at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, where a site extending back to Catherine de Médicis's sixteenth-century palace evolved through Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières's circular 1760s grain market, François-Joseph Bélanger's pioneering 1813 iron dome and Henri Blondel's 1889 exchange before Tadao Ando inserted his contemporary concrete cylinder. Continue to Église Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, whose layered medieval fabric was restored by Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Victor Baltard after the church was sacked in 1831, before Jacques Ignace Hittorff and Théodore Ballu created the neighboring mairie and neo-Gothic belfry during the Second Empire. Conclude at Pont Neuf, where Henri III laid the first stone in 1578 before the Wars of Religion interrupted construction, Henri IV resumed the project and inaugurated it in 1607, and 381 individually modeled mascarons originally transformed Paris's oldest surviving bridge into an unprecedented piece of royal urban theater. The progression moves from five centuries of architectural invention through the layered ecclesiastical character of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois into Henri IV's reimagining of the Seine crossing, revealing the deep culture of patronage and craftsmanship surrounding Cheval Blanc Paris.
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