Hotel Westminster Paris reopens with fifth star and British accent

Hotel Westminster picked up its fifth star in 2025, capping a restoration that wrapped a year earlier at 13 rue de la Paix, between Place Vendôme and the Palais Garnier. Interior architect Laurent Maugoust led the overhaul of 102 rooms, including 20 suites; British designer Helen Stephens reimagined the restaurant, Le Céladon. Not bad for a building that started life as the Hôtel Wagram in 1807.

The distinction is an odd one: a distinctly British hotel in one of the most recognizably French corners of Paris. That character was earned honestly, as British travelers settled the neighborhood until locals called it a small piece of London in Paris. The street itself carries the imprint of Napoleon Bonaparte, who in 1802 ordered the sale of land belonging to a former Capuchin convent and commissioned architects Percier and Fontaine to develop a new district. The street opened as rue Napoléon before becoming rue de la Paix in 1814. Architect Jacques Marcel Aubertin delivered the Haussmannian silhouette the building still wears, in extensions and renovations carried out between 1905 and 1907.

How do you restore two centuries of layers?

Maugoust's answer was to refuse the period-piece route. Instead of recreating a single historical moment, he worked with architectural elements belonging to different eras: marble fireplaces, decorative mouldings and herringbone oak parquet floors, combined with contemporary furnishings and textiles in shades of beige, green and violet.

'I set out to reinterpret its style by bringing different eras into dialogue,' Maugoust explains. The approach draws on his experience with Haussmannian interiors, where proportions, materials and craftsmanship establish a continuity between past and present. The project builds on the existing architecture rather than replacing it.

The hotel has also accumulated its own collection over the decades, and the restoration leaves it in place: antique clocks, some dating from the 19th century, scattered through rooms and suites, alongside paintings, historical photographs and furnishings tied to the property's past. Some suites overlook rue de la Paix; others face a flower-filled inner courtyard. Two rather different views of central Paris, one staircase apart. Even the supposedly timeless Haussmannian setting has, it turns out, undergone more than a few changes.

What survives at Duke's Bar?

The hotel's loudest British connection survives at Duke's Bar, an English-club interior of dark wood panelling, deep armchairs, subdued lighting and an original fireplace. During the 1920s the bar drew British aristocrats and political figures, then writers and Parisian cultural personalities. According to the hotel's historical account, Winston Churchill was a regular; Coco Chanel, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Françoise Sagan also frequented the address. Black-and-white portraits of Churchill, Chanel, Rudyard Kipling and the Duke of Westminster now line the walls.

At Le Céladon, Stephens took a different route to the same history, designing the restaurant to connect visually with Duke's Bar. Shades of green reference both the bronze of the Vendôme Column and the foliage of the nearby Tuileries Garden, pulling the surrounding city into the dining rooms.

Beyond dinner service, the hotel keeps its cultural ties warm through musical evenings and literary events organized with Galignani, the city's historic English-language bookshop. More than two centuries after the first hotel opened on rue de la Paix, Parisian architecture and British tradition remain, at the Westminster, two identities difficult to separate.

Project info: Hôtel Westminster Paris, 13 rue de la Paix. Designers: Laurent Maugoust and Helen Stephens. Location: Paris, France.