A hundred years ago a shipping heiress asked the architect Émile Varenne for a hotel where nobody would ever be rushed. He gave her marble, brass and a ballroom with a sprung floor. We have spent the century since keeping the promise.
The Arlington Grand opened on 3 May 1924, in time for the spring season at the Opéra. Its first register lists a duchess, two composers, a racing driver and a gentleman who signed only as “M.”
In a century the hotel has closed its doors only once, from 1940 to 1944. The sommelier bricked up the cellar before he left; in 1945 every bottle was found exactly where he had laid it.
Varenne drew every door handle himself. Forty-two kinds of marble came from eleven quarries; the fan window above the rooftop was cut from a single sheet of 1924 glass and has never been replaced.
The 2022 restoration took four years. Craftsmen relaid the parquet by hand, re-silvered the mirrors and rewove the velvet from the original pattern books, found in the attic in a hatbox.
Some of our staff are the third generation of their family to work here. Anton, our chef concierge, arrived as a bellboy in 1995 and has since found a harpist at two in the morning, a lost dog in the Tuileries and an engagement ring in a soufflé.
We train for discretion before anything else. What happens in the house stays in the house; the house has an excellent memory and a very short tongue.
The greenest building is the one already standing. We repair before we renew, recover heat from the kitchens to warm the pool, and have run on renewable electricity since 2021.
Ninety per cent of what we serve comes from within 250 kilometres of the avenue. The honey in your breakfast is from our own hives on the roof, where the bees have the best view in Paris.
We don’t keep secrets. We simply forget them very quickly.
