Grand Hôtel du Palais Royal

The corner building at 4 rue de Valois and 2 place de Valois dates from the first quarter of the 18th century, according to the French Ministry of Culture's Mérimée register. Its façades and roofs on the street and the square were listed as a historic monument on 29 April 1946.^[1]

Place de Valois, the square beside the hotel, was once the cour des Fontaines, part of the Palais-Royal, and took its present name in 1867. Rue de Valois opened in 1784 on land from the palace's former garden. Both are named after the duc de Valois, eldest son of the duc d'Orléans, whose family owned the palace.^[2][4]

The hotel takes its name from the Palais-Royal, the 17th-century residence of Cardinal Richelieu. The playwright Molière's company performed in the palace theater from 1661. In 1673 Molière was taken ill there while performing his play Le Malade imaginaire, and he died a few hours later. After his death, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully turned the hall into an opera house.^[3][4]

Valois Finance, the company that runs the hotel, was registered at 4 rue de Valois in March 2006. In 2008 the hotel already traded as the Grand Hôtel du Palais Royal, with 85 rooms. The company's president until 2020 was Gilles Marang, who went into Paris hotels in the 1990s. Since 2020 the company has been led by Iena Gestion et Participations, the Marang family company behind Paristory, a group of four Paris hotels.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

After a complete renovation by the designer Pierre-Yves Rochon, costing about €10 million, the hotel reopened in 2013 with 68 rooms and suites. The decoration included plaster busts of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. The luggage room was set inside an oversized Louis Vuitton trunk at the foot of an 18th-century staircase. The restaurant, then named Le Lulli after Jean-Baptiste Lully, is now Café 52.^[10][11]