Who slept where, and why.
The house keeps a scrapbook. Here are a few of its pages, opened for the first time outside the library on the mezzanine. Touch a photograph to turn the page.
- 1924
The first name in the register
Duchess Adelheid signs first and leaves the ballroom last.
The orchestra played until four. At dawn the Duchess asked for the top floor for a week; she returned for eleven summers, and the fan window above the rooftop was cut to her wishes.
- 1926
Sebastian Král runs out of paper
A composer checks in for a week and stays until spring.
Out of manuscript paper, Král wrote his Avenue Waltz on our letterhead. The first page still hangs in the suite that carries his name; he settled the bill with two tickets to the premiere.
- 1931
The martini that never changed
The rooftop bar opens with eight cocktails on the card.
Head bartender Lucien Fabre set the recipe for the Arlington Martini on opening night: London gin, a rinse of dry vermouth, a lemon twist cut over the glass. It has not been altered since.
- 1933
An aviator lands at Le Bourget
Conrad Ashby arrives from the airfield and plans a route to Cairo.
He spread his charts across the carpet of Room 412 for a month. When he left for the south he forgot his brass telescope by the window. It is still pointing east.
- 1945
The cellar is unbricked
After four years closed, every bottle is found where it was laid.
Sommelier Henri Lacoste had walled up the cellar in 1940 and told no one. He returned in 1945, took a pickaxe to the wall himself, and served the 1921 Yquem at the reopening dinner.
- 1949
A film star asks for the quiet side
Lida Moreau spends a winter on the courtyard, out of reach of the lenses.
She chose the courtyard because no long lens could reach it. The night porter of the time liked to say that she taught him the tango in the third-floor corridor; nobody has ever contradicted him.
- 2022
Four years of restoration end
The chandelier comes down, crystal by crystal, and goes back up.
Eleven thousand crystals were cleaned by hand, the velvet rewoven from the original pattern books and the parquet relaid. The house reopened on 3 May, ninety-eight years to the day.