Le Bristol Paris

Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré was the main street of the suburb that grew outside the Saint-Honoré gate of Paris. A charter of 1222 already shows it as the road from the church of Saint-Honoré to the Roule bridge. Avenue Matignon, at the hotel's corner, is named after Charles Auguste de Goyon, Count of Matignon (1646–1729), a marshal of France.^[1]

Before the hotel, number 112 was the Hôtel de Castellane, a mansion where Count Jules de Castellane staged private theatre performances in the 19th century. When it was auctioned in 1861, the notice described a house between courtyard and garden with an Egyptian museum, a theatre and a greenhouse. The City of Paris's old-Paris committee recorded its demolition in April 1923.^[2][3]

Le Bristol was built as a hotel after the old house on the site, the petit hôtel de Noailles, was demolished in 1923. A permit published in June 1923 names its owner as the Société Jammet and its architects as Gustave Umbdenstock and Urbain Cassan. Newspaper advertisements announced the opening of the hotel, with 200 rooms and 160 bathrooms, on 15 April 1925. The hotel says its founder, Hippolyte Jammet, named it after Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, an 18th-century traveller. It is not the older Hôtel Bristol on the place Vendôme, which had closed by 1921.^[4][5][6][7]

The hotel says that in June 1940 it became the home of the American Embassy and of American citizens in Paris, and that Hippolyte Jammet kept it from being requisitioned during the German occupation. After the Liberation, the official diplomatic list of February 1945 shows the missions of Brazil, Ecuador and Luxembourg keeping offices at the hotel. On 14 December 1957, during a NATO summit in Paris, the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles met the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Adenauer's suite at the hotel.^[6][8][9]

According to the hotel, the Oetker family's company bought Le Bristol in 1978 and added the sixth-floor pool in the early 1980s. A wing on avenue Matignon opened in 2009 with 26 more rooms and suites and the 114 Faubourg restaurant. The City of Paris approved the conversion of that building into an extension of the hotel in 2005.^[6][10]