La Réserve Paris – Hotel and Spa

Avenue Gabriel is named after Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698–1782), the architect of the place de la Concorde, which it joins. Its western stretch was laid out in 1670 and the rest in 1767. Rue du Cirque, at the hotel's corner, was named in 1849 after the circus that stood nearby on the Champs-Élysées.^[1]

The building was under construction in 1854 and was built as large apartments, but its architect is not known. In 1884 a Paris society directory listed more than a dozen households at number 42. The insurance company La Nationale owned the building from 1888, and the mining company Compagnie Royale Asturienne des Mines owned it from 1920 and gave it as its own address.^[2][3][4][5]

The hotel says the building belonged to the family of the Duke of Morny, the half-brother of Napoleon III, until 1888, and it names a suite and its library after him. No record confirms the Morny ownership, and no Morny appears among the residents of 42 avenue Gabriel listed in an 1884 Paris society directory.^[6][3]

The couturier Pierre Cardin's company bought the building in 1980 and turned it into a hotel, the Résidence Maxim's, which his hotel company ran from 1985. Cardin's companies sold the hotel business in 2009 to a company called Middlebury Estate, which sold it in 2010 to Foncière PLM, a company of the businessman Michel Reybier's family. A permit approved in November 2011 allowed the interior to be largely rebuilt. The city's heritage committee, the Commission du Vieux Paris, objected that the planned demolitions amounted to keeping little more than the façades. La Réserve Paris opened in January 2015, with interiors by Jacques Garcia.^{[2][7][8][9][10][11][6]}