A majestic mansion with Eiffel Tower views and Michelin-starred cuisine
Style
Originally the private mansion of Roland Bonaparte, eccentric botanist and great-nephew of Napoleon, the hotel evokes a grand classical lifestyle with a grand stairway and a string of historic salons. The public rooms retain regal grandeur and have been listed and painstakingly restored with hand-gilded panelling and neoclassical friezes.
Rooms
Apart from the modern penthouse suite and the Imperial suite in Roland’s former private apartment with nymphs dancing across the bathroom and a butler’s kitchen, the 81 bedrooms and suites are calmly classical, recalling the French grand lifestyle, in soft creams and beiges or blues and greys, with deep beds and sofas. Some face the Eiffel Tower with fantastic views, while others have large rooftop terraces.
Food and Drink
At the start of 2015, chef Christophe Moret moved to Shangri-La’s haute-cuisine French restaurant L’Abeille, bringing with him more than twenty years of experience in French gastronomy and his own style.
Moret oversees the cosmopolitan Franco-Asian all-day Bauhinia restaurant, in the circular former cinema, where a novelty is the 100% vegetable menu on the first Thursday of the month.
So too the one Michelin-starred Shang Palace in the basement, with its main dining room and series of small private rooms, where chef Samuel Lee Sum serves probably the best, most authentic Cantonese cuisine in town.
Spa
There’s something undoubtedly regal about the spa at the Shangri-La. You step downstairs to enter, but in fact you reach ground level down the hill in what were once the stables. The big surprise here is the soaring perspective of the colonnaded day-lit swimming pool, while the spacious, candlelit treatment rooms of the Carita spa are geared for relaxing, complete with shower and hammam.
