Hôtel Château des Fleurs

In the 19th century, the Château des Fleurs was a public garden with music and dancing near the top of the Champs-Élysées. It opened in early August 1847. The writer Théophile Gautier described its opening in a column dated 2 August 1847: flower beds, colored-glass lamps hanging in arches of leaves, a Moorish-style minaret lit by colored flares, a large orchestra and singers performing in the open air. A London weekly, The Literary Gazette, reported that entry cost one franc and that children went in free.^[1][2]

The garden held balls and concerts. In 1854 the writer Eugène Chapus described it as a branch of the Bal Mabille, the best-known dance garden on the Champs-Élysées, run by the same management and open on the nights Mabille was closed. Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot (1868–69) mentions it too: a satirical newspaper article in the novel says the manager of the Château des Fleurs pocketed at least a third of the money Russian peasants had paid their landlords under serfdom.^[4][3][5]

The garden closed in 1866 and was demolished to extend rue de Bassano. Félix de Rochegude, a historian of the streets of Paris, wrote in 1910 that the western section of rue Vernet, from rue de Bassano to avenue Marceau, had been laid out on the grounds of the old garden. The hotel is on that section. Until 1864 rue Vernet was called rue des Vignes. It was then renamed after the painters Claude Joseph, Carle and Horace Vernet.^[6][7][8]

The hotel describes its building as a mansion of 1910, although its website before the opening gave 1900. By 2003 the building was the Hôtel Amarante Elysées Star, a 42-room hotel run by JJW Hotels & Resorts. It was probably the same hotel as the Elysées Star, which listed the same rooms and said on its website in 2001 that it had been entirely restored in 1991 to bring back its original Haussmann style. By 2010 it had become the Hôtel Amarante Champs-Élysées, a four-star hotel.^{[13][12][10][9][11]}

The present hotel opened as the Château des Fleurs in 2023, after a redesign by Quintana Partners, and was classified five stars on 22 August 2023. The hotel says its decoration pays tribute to the Parisian fêtes of the 19th century and to the Belle Époque, the years before the First World War. It does not say whether its name comes from the old garden.^{[12][13][14][15]}