Cheval Blanc Paris

The Samaritaine department store began in 1870, when Ernest Cognacq rented a small part of a commercial building on rue du Pont-Neuf. He and his wife Marie-Louise Jaÿ then bought the house and, floor by floor, the building facing it on rue de la Monnaie. In 1885 Cognacq hired the architect Frantz Jourdain, who between 1905 and 1910 built the store's steel-framed building known as magasin 2. Its Art Nouveau decoration was the work of his son Francis Jourdain, the painter Eugène Grasset, the ironworker Édouard Schenck and the ceramicist Alexandre Bigot. A prefectoral order of 25 July 1990 inscribed magasin 2 in full, together with the façades and roofs of the later magasin 3 on rue de Rivoli, on the supplementary inventory of historic monuments.^[1][4]

The hotel occupies the store's later extension toward the Seine. In 1925 Cognacq was authorized to build it. Work began in January 1926 under Frantz Jourdain and Henri Sauvage and finished in September 1928, after many changes to the first design. At the request of the Préfecture, the steel frame was clad in cream-colored stone.^[1][2][5]

The Samaritaine closed in 2005 for safety reasons, and its owner LVMH rebuilt the whole site over the following sixteen years. The architect Édouard François won the design competition for the hotel in 2011, with an opening then planned for 2015. François set winter gardens behind the existing bay windows, so that the rooms look onto the river through greenery, and built a new rear façade for the restaurant floor, whose public terrace opens onto a 750 m² rooftop garden. The hotel says the Samaritaine façade was preserved in its entirety. The department store reopened on 23 June 2021, with a new glass building by the Japanese practice SANAA on rue de Rivoli and the historic buildings restored under Jean-François Lagneau, chief architect of historic monuments.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]}

Cheval Blanc Paris opened on 7 September 2021. It belongs to LVMH's Cheval Blanc group, which has run hotels since 2006. Peter Marino designed the interiors, which the hotel describes as being in the spirit of a private apartment. The hotel commissioned a horse sculpture from the architect Frank Gehry, and its public spaces hold a woven-metal staircase by Sophie Mallebranche, gilded-bronze panels by Ingrid Donat and paintings by Vik Muniz and Sonia Delaunay. The Ravel Suite has a staircase railing commissioned from Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. Atout France, the French state tourism agency, classified the hotel five stars, with 72 rooms, in a decision dated 23 December 2025, and on 2 June 2026 it was one of six French hotels awarded the Palace distinction.^{[10][2][9][11][12][13][14][15]}