Le Pavillon de la Reine & Spa

The place des Vosges was laid out from 1605 on the orders of Henri IV as the place Royale. Its first building was the Pavillon du Roi on the south side, put up between 1605 and 1607 by the king's buildings administration. The square was complete by April 1612, when a three-day festival of tournaments, the Camp de la place Royale, celebrated the announcement of the Spanish marriages, among them that of the young Louis XIII to Anne of Austria. It was renamed place des Vosges in September 1800, after the Vosges, the first French department to pay all of its taxes, and has carried that name without a break since 1870.^[1][4][3]

The hotel's address includes the Pavillon de la Reine, the tall pavilion in the middle of the north side whose three arches carry a passage through to rue de Béarn. It is the twin of the Pavillon du Roi opposite, and the 17th-century historian Henri Sauval, quoted in Lucien Lambeau's 1906 history of the square, wrote that both were built at the king's expense and remained his property. The hotel says that Anne of Austria lived in the wing between the hotel and the square. The pavilion's one carved ornament is a large sun on the keystone of the central arch, which appears to hold up the balcony above it.^[4][1][5]

Number 28 is the last even number on the square and, in Lambeau's words, its most important building: half of one standard pavilion, the whole of the next and the Pavillon de la Reine itself, nine arches in all. The Ministry of Culture lists the house as the former Hôtel d'Espinoy. Its façades, roofs, arcade, entrance doors and wrought-iron staircase, together with the pavilion's façades, roofs, vaulted passage and two first-floor salons with 18th-century paneling, have been protected as a historic monument since 21 December 1984.^[4][2]

The hotel belongs to the Chevalier family. The family's own history begins in the 1950s with a grandfather from the Auvergne who built up brasseries in western Paris. His son and daughter moved into hotels in the 1980s. After her brother's death Madame Chevalier ran the business, and her sons Jérôme and Éric Chevalier joined her in 2008. The family gives no opening date for the Pavillon de la Reine. A trade article of June 2014 put the hotel's age at 25 years. Its website called it four-star from April 2000 until at least April 2017. By July 2018 the trade press called it five-star. The restaurant Anne opened in July 2018 with menus by the chef Mathieu Pacaud, won a Michelin star in 2020 and passed to Thibault Sombardier by February 2026.^{[6][8][9][10][11][12][7][13]}