The Belle Étoile penthouse suite at Le Méurice is, at 620 square metres, the largest suite in Paris. It has a private cinema, a wine cellar, a hot tub, and a wraparound rooftop terrace from which you can see, on a clear day, essentially the entire city. It costs, at certain points in the year, over €20,000 per night.
We did not stay in the Belle Étoile. We stayed in a Superior Suite on a lower floor, which overlooks the Tuileries Garden through a set of tall windows that have been looking at the garden since 1835, when the hotel moved to its current address at 228 Rue de Rivoli, in the first arrondissement, between Place de la Concorde and the Louvre.
The fashion week proximity needs to be stated plainly because it is the article’s entire premise: the shows that happen in and around the Tuileries — the central venue for Paris fashion week, the axis around which the city’s commercial fashion calendar has always rotated — are visible, from the right rooms at Le Méurice, from the window. Not in a useful sense. In a poetic sense that, by the third day of the week, feels like a comment.
Salvador Dalí lived at Le Meurice for three months every year. The suite named for him retains, improbably, his furniture. It is a room that has been waiting for you to understand it.
The Splendid Edit — Issue No. 01, ParisThe hotel
Le Méurice has been at 228 Rue de Rivoli since 1835, which means it has been watching Paris fashion week since before Paris fashion week existed and will presumably continue to do so after it has become something else entirely. The hotel is part of the Dorchester Collection and has 160 rooms, 54 of which are suites. The Louis XVI-style architecture was designed by Henri Paul Nénot and is precisely as ornate as that description implies, which is either appropriate or excessive depending on your tolerance for gilt.
Salvador Dalí lived here for three months every year until his death. There is a suite named for him. The suite contains his original furniture, which is the kind of detail that sounds like marketing until you are standing in the room with it. It is a room that rewards attention in proportion to the attention you bring to it, which is probably what Dalí would have preferred.
The lobby entrance — Le Meurice, 228 Rue de Rivoli, Paris. Photography by Mark Read
Alain Ducasse
The two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Le Méurice Alain Ducasse is, along with the view of the Tuileries, the primary reason to be in the hotel rather than the many other hotels that could accommodate you for Paris fashion week. The cooking, overseen by Executive Chef Amaury Bouhours under Ducasse’s direction, approaches French cuisine as a question of essence: what is the ingredient, what does it want to become, what would interfere with that process. The menu titles are deliberately minimal — the product, not the technique.
Cédric Grolet, whose pastry work at Le Méurice made him briefly one of the most discussed pastry chefs in the world, continues to contribute to the hotel’s pastry programme. His trompe-l’œil fruit sculptures — pastries made to look exactly like their primary ingredient — are served at Le Dalí, the hotel’s more casual restaurant, which is designed by Philippe Starck and is the only establishment in the world officially authorised to use Salvador Dalí’s name.
The Belle Étoile suite terrace — 620 square metres overlooking all of Paris
The Splendid Edit visited Le Méurice during Paris Fashion Week, March 2026. Superior Suite rates from approximately €1,200 per night. The Dalí Suite from €5,000. Book through dorchestercollection.com/paris/le-meurice.
Photography courtesy of Le Méurice, Paris — © Dorchester Collection / Christophe Dugied