Hôtel de Berri

Rue de Berri dates from 1778, when royal letters patent widened an older lane here. The Comte d'Artois, a younger brother of King Louis XVI who later reigned as King Charles X, opened part of the street across the grounds of the former royal tree nursery, which he had bought in 1772. The hotel occupies numbers 18 to 22, which include the sites of two older houses at numbers 20 and 22.^[1][2]

Number 20 was the Paris home of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte (1820–1904), a niece of Napoleon I and a cousin of Emperor Napoleon III. She settled there after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and died in the house on 2 January 1904. The house stood behind a gravel courtyard, and only its outbuildings could be seen from the street. In 1905 the house became the Belgian legation, Belgium's diplomatic mission in Paris.^[2][3]

Princess Mathilde's literary salon, a regular evening gathering of writers and artists, met at the house until her death. The novelist Marcel Proust was a guest. In Le Figaro on 25 February 1903, writing under the pen name Dominique, Proust described an evening there. He noted that it was one of the few houses in Paris where guests were invited to dine at half past seven.^[3][4]

In 1937 the Italian-born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli bought the 18-room house at number 22, and she lived there until her death in 1973. In her 1954 autobiography, Shocking Life, she wrote that she had found a private house with a courtyard on rue de Berri: "I saw it, loved it, and felt I belonged to it." She added that the house number, 22, was lucky for her, because two and two make four.^[2][5][6][7]

Neither the house at number 20 nor the house at number 22 survives. Meryle Secrest, Schiaparelli's biographer, writes that the house at number 22 was torn down to make way for an office building and a parking garage. The building on the site today dates from 1980, according to the Paris urban planning agency APUR, so it is not the house where Princess Mathilde or Schiaparelli lived. The building was renovated in 2018 and opened that year as a hotel in Marriott's Luxury Collection brand. At the opening, the hotel described itself as "built on the footprint" of Schiaparelli's former residence.^{[8][9][10][11]}