When guests walk the corridors of the Paris Peninsula the loudest noise is likely to be the sound of their own breathing. Maybe they will hear a door close, softly, like a kiss. Or a footman will come past carrying a tray draped in white linen, silver and porcelain floating in its midst.
The corridors of the former Hotel Majestic once told a different story; back in May 2011 they were the stage for a ballet of dust and construction traffic, performed to a symphony of jackhammers and drills.
The Peninsula Hotels took charge of number 19 Avenue Kléber in 2009. The antique building had stood at the corner of Avenue Kléber and the Avenue des Portugais since 1907 and had witnessed two world wars plus all the turmoil of the late 20th century.
The transformation of a structure from a middle aged ruin into a contemporary luxury hotel was a daunting prospect, especially when the original construction quality left much to be desired and for most of its history the building had been in the hands of government officials. Ballrooms that had been turned into conference halls had to be restored. And with the original architect’s grand staircase ruled off-limits as a means of accessing the building’s upper floors, modern elevators had to be installed in towers that rose from a secluded interior courtyard.
In the basement, spas had to be carved from the original foundations, while on the upper floors suites crafted from materials both modern and ancient. And all this had be done while preserving the original heritage of the structure.
A modern luxury hotel, even one in an antique building, must have marble bathrooms, beds that are the last word in comfort, beguiling entertainment systems, universal wireless access, restaurants that provide superior cuisine, imperial style swimming pools and spas with unique treatment rooms.
All these accoutrements add weight and in the case of the Paris Peninsula this meant an eighty per cent increase in the load that the building placed on its foundations. In other words the Peninsula Paris is almost twice as heavy as the Hotel Majestic, which first opened its doors to guests in April 1908. The two hotels may look the similar from the outside, but on the interior they are like sun and moon, the old Majestic being just a pale reflection of the palace that now stands within its rose within its space.
To support the additional load, new foundations had to be dug beneath the original structure. This required the removal of earth by the thousands of metric tonnes, to be replaced by reinforced concrete floors and concrete encased steel beams. For the first year of construction much of the work done on the new Peninsula was more like mining than building, as teams dug beneath old kitchens and servant quarters to create new roots for the enormous forest of rooms above. The project lasted for four and a half years and over 900 workers were involved on site.
After 19 Avenue Kléber was vacated by the French government, in March 2009, it was necessary to strip out the interior vestiges of an international conference centre, which had been housed in the building and controlled by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Under the terms of the building permit the contractors were compelled to conduct the stripping with great delicacy. Like removing layers of varnish from an Old Master painting, the artisans had to be careful to protect what lay beneath and many vestiges of the original Beaux Arts building were discovered under false ceilings. Gorgeous frescoes that had been sheathed in polystyrene saw light for the first time since the 1950s and wood panelling imprisoned beneath cheap chipboard and wallpaper was suddenly set free.
For the most part these liberated treasures were carried away with care to be restored, before their glorious return to the new hotel, although some of the larger pieces were cleaned and made new again in situ.
In the process of removing scars from the recent past the grand old building gave up another secret that had a bearing upon the labour taking place in the basement.
“We found that the walls and support beams had been built to specifications that would not be acceptable today,” says James Mercer, of PPR Design Consultants, who managed the Peninsula Paris project from start to finish. “They might have lasted for one hundred years but they were not fit for our purpose.”
On a tour of the upper floors in 2011 he found an example of the original building’s defects. Near a stairwell he plucked out a brick from a half demolished wall to reveal the cinders that lay behind.
“The original builders did this with the floors as well,” he says. “They basically filled in cavities with incinerated garbage and other types of debris. It was a typical technique for Parisian builders of the early 20th century, to use cinders as infill, but that did not suit the demanding standards of the Peninsula or the modern day building inspectors of France.”
Nearby stood a series of thick and sturdy concrete pillars that now frame the fourth floor corridor. They looked like they could withstand a sizable earthquake, but a few steps away, around a turn in the corridor, Mercer pointed to a thin metal post running from floor to ceiling.
“These were the original floor supports,” he says. “We have encased each one in a special kind of concrete, because they would never have been able to support the new [and much heavier] rooms above. Now they have twice as much weight bearing capability than they actually need, but we have to build in redundancy.”
The extra weight of the new concrete pillars also sent additional forces heading toward the basement. Originally the foundations for the Majestic were built with a new form of concrete that was reinforced with steel. The technique was so fresh that when the Majestic was rising from the ruins of the Palais de Castille, which had previously occupied the site, the City of Paris had not yet laid down codes for its use. At the request of the Parisian authorities the Peninsula owners agreed to preserve a large portion of the original foundation, even though this required the construction of a special “cage” of cross beams above the archaic concrete, in order to enhance it’s strength.
“The reinforced foundation is an unusual antiquity, for a city like Paris that has so many grand buildings,” says Mercer. “But the Peninsula is not just the new owner of the hotel, they are the custodians of its past heritage, and it’s important to preserve as much of the past as possible.”
This dedication to a conservationist’s approach posed other problems. In 1905, when construction on the Majestic began, Paris was still a city of horse-drawn carriages with few motorcars. The streets surrounding the Arc De Triomphe, including Avenue Kléber, were twice their current width. Kléber itself had a line of trees running down its centre and carriages could turn off in the direction of open parkland to the West of the hotel’s porte-cochère. The pavement was broad, to accommodate the Parisienne upper class who lived in the area. The men would walk the streets with their top hats and tail coats, accompanied by women in crinoline dresses and picture hats. Uniformed servants would push infant children in coach-built perambulators.
Within the hotel a strict class hierarchy also ruled the roost. Leonard Tauber, the original owner of the Majestic Hotel envisioned his new gem as “an “aristocratic” hotel without rivalry”, as he wrote in the brochure that was published when the Majestic property first opened. His hope was to “arouse in every traveller the delicate illusion that he is not a stranger in a foreign country but rather that he is staying in the Palace of some friend who is a master of beautiful proportions and rare trinkets.”
To achieve this goal the hotels 400 apartments and rooms each had their own antechamber and adjacent bathroom. These rooms, and the galleries at the end of each corridor, enabled the guest’s servants to perform their duties in tandem with the hotel staff. These servants needed accommodation and in the manner of the age they were given the rooms at the top of the house, in the garret. The best rooms were on the lower floors, an essential consideration in a hotel that was originally built with elevators primarily for the use of porters carrying luggage.
This system worked very well in 1908, when the grand houses and palaces of the era had floors with heights that became increasingly low as the building rose to the sky. In the twenty-first century priorities have changed somewhat. Hotel guests rarely travel with domestic staff and the premium rooms are those with the most impressive views. And in the case of this building these would be the ones in the curved roof space, where the ceiling height is barely eight feet. The Peninsula’s solution was to create a Presidential suite on the top floor of the house, with a private garden looking out over Avenue Kléber and the Arc de Triomphe, plus a royal suite on the first floor, where blue-blooded guests and those of similar status can enjoy a suite with soaring ceilings.
“It was a difficult to make the decision,” says Mercer. “The area where we have made the private garden has a wonderful view and could have been made accessible to all our guests, but it was felt the height of the ceilings in the Presidential suite demanded that we use the outdoor space to compliment a marvellous apartment suite that stretches the full length of the building. It’s hard to imagine a more exclusive or magnificent space in Paris from which to enjoy views of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eifel Tower. In this case we felt it was essential to go the extra mile.”
And a mile – or kilometre – and many of them is the only measure of distance to employ when calculating the amount of pipe, wiring and carpet that were used to create the polished accoutrements of the finished hotel, but before all these essential threads could be run through the magnificent tapestry that the building has now become, the contractors had to confront another enormous challenge.
Where now there are tiles beneath the pellucid waters of the swimming pool there once stood a rock foundation amid piles of earth and miniature bulldozers, and the workers could see straight up through the floor of the Grand Hall, to the frescoed ceilings that now welcome guests as they are checked in at the Lobby. Here the construction team had the arduous task of building down into a strata of earth that had to be stabilized as they worked, steel supports and reinforcing rods being hammered into place as they excavated and strengthened in the manner of an expert dentist filling a decaying tooth.
In late 2011, standing within this subterranean space, the artificial lights of the contractors threw strange shadows upon enormous panes of glass, behind which the sliver that had once made them into mirrors hung in tattered strips and shreds, shimmering like the ghosts of past guests dancing across the tiled floors. The scene had the air of a ruin from a lost civilization, a different age in which aristocrats, writers and composers mingled before the dark curtain of war descended over Europe in 1918, just ten years after the Hotel Majestic opened its doors. Beneath the sound of jackhammers one could almost hear Stravinsky playing the piano at the famous party thrown for him at the Majestic in 1922, when Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso joined him to celebrate the premiere of the composer’s ballet-opera Le Renard.
“You can imagine all these people being here,” says Mercer. “The hotel has such a grand air and it was the largest luxury hotel in the world when it opened. We shrank the number of rooms (to 220) but we also had to include amenities that were never dreamed of when the hotel was originally built.”
Like the swimming pool, carved out of a deep hole dug beneath the grand hall in soil that once grew vegetables for the Parisiennes who would rise up to depose Louis XVI and his Austrian queen. Nowhere else in the hotel is the achievement of its transformation more profound than in the pool and spa areas. For here the true spirit of a modern luxury hotel has been conjured from an improbably small space between the foundations of the original building and the loam of an agrarian society that is long gone.
“The wonderful thing about turning this building into a Peninsula hotel has been knowing that we are adding another chapter to a storied history,” says Mercer. “The old hotel died in 1936, when it became a government building. Now it is reborn.”
The rebirth of the hotel involved an army of unique specialists, including S.O.E. Stuc & Staff, a company that has been manufacturing and restoring fine plaster work since 1905. The company was charged with bringing the Majestic’s vivid plaster work back to life, with its many colors and elaborate shapes. “At The Peninusla we researched the original colors and we did some research on the pigments,” says Bruno Rondez. “So today we can assure that the material we used is exactly the same as a century ago. Our elders have always passed on their know-how from generation to generation and today we really have this desire to train young people so those crafts don’t disappear.”
The restoration drew upon some of the most talented craftsmen and women in Paris, many of whom come from families that have a history of fine work stretching back to the Hausmannian renovation of the mid-19th century. “We have wallpaperers, canvas restorers, stucco specialists, gilders, locksmiths, glaziers,” says Damaris Detours of Affine Architecture and Interior Design. “There is a whole ancestral savor-faire.” Thomas Fancelli is one of the team who brought generations of expertise to the task. “I come from a family of woodwork restorers,” he says. “My grandfather worked in many palaces, including Versailles. My father carried on, and I took over the helm from him. At the Peninsula Paris I had the chance to restore the panelling.”
The creation of the new hotel also involved contemporary artists. Xavier Corbrero created a sculpture of stone for the lobby that is designed to inspire the hotel’s guests as they embark on their discovery of Paris. “I want to think of nature,” he says. “Nature opens the doors of imagination, and imagination opens the doors of reality.” In the courtyard Ben Jakober provided another way of looking at reality, creating a work of art in the form of a large concave mirror with a rainbow around it, which will reflect the buildings and city skyline. Mercer says the Peninsula should be proud of the outcome achieved by the restoration’s meticulous attention to detail. “I believe we have given the building back its true soul and its true identity,” he says. “that’s what it was, that’s what its meant to be and now its back to life and probably the best hotel in Paris.”
And maybe, in the building’s hushed corridors, if you listen carefully, you might hear Stravinsky, Proust, Picasso and Joyce celebrating this majestic return, the recreation of Leonard Tauber’s dream of a hotel like no other.
