Hôtel Lancaster

Rue de Berri is named after the Berry, a French province that was one of the largest estates of the Comte d'Artois, a younger brother of King Louis XVI. The Comte d'Artois opened part of the street on his land in the 18th century.^[1]

Work on the building began in 1879. A builders' journal of that year records an apartment building at 7 rue de Berri for an owner named Drake del Castillo, designed by an architect named De Royou. A Paris directory of 1900 lists Jacques Drake, a member of the French parliament, at the address. The hotel describes the building as a private mansion of 1889, but the 1879 notice describes a block of flats.^[2][3][16]

The Hôtel Lancaster was open by June 1925, when it placed a job advertisement in Le Figaro. In December 1925 a new company was formed to run the hotel, then called The Lancaster, and the hotelier Jean-Émile Wolf contributed the business to it. In 1930 the New York Herald described Wolf as the owner of the Lancaster.^[4][5][6]

The English-language newspapers of Paris recorded American actors and writers staying at the hotel. The actresses Ina Claire and Helen Menken stayed in August 1925. The writer Julian Street and the film star Norma Talmadge stayed in 1928, and the writer and campaigner Helen Keller stayed in January 1937. The American performer Ruth Draper, known for her one-woman monologues, gave an interview at the hotel in May 1931.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]}

Marlene Dietrich, the German-born film star, checked in on 20 July 1937 for a four-day rest after crossing the Atlantic on the liner Normandie, according to the New York Herald Tribune. In May 1938 the Paris edition of the Daily Mail reported that she and her husband, Rudolf Sieber, planned to stay at the hotel for several months. The hotel says she lived in the suite now named after her for three years in the 1930s. These newspaper reports do not confirm how long she stayed.^[13][14][17]

The hotel also tells stories that no record of the time has been found to confirm. It says its founder, Émile Wolf, had the hotel declared neutral ground during the German occupation of Paris in the Second World War, so that German soldiers could not enter. It also says the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, once hid in Marlene Dietrich's bathroom during a visit by German officials. The hotel says the Russian-born painter Boris Pastoukhoff paid for long stays with paintings. Pastoukhoff's link with the hotel is documented: a 1937 newspaper photograph shows him with one of his portraits at a charity event there.^[16][15]

In 2012 the chef Michel Troisgros ran the hotel's restaurant, La Table du Lancaster, which then held one Michelin star. That year the French family group SD2P bought the hotel. Company notices show that the Spanish group Hospes had controlled it since 2010. CHG Participations took over in January 2019, and the studio of Jean-Philippe Nuel redesigned the hotel in 2020.^[18][19][20]