Hôtel Splendide Royal Paris

Rue du Cirque was opened by an ordinance of 4 May 1847 on land belonging to the Duke of Galliera, and was first called rue de Joinville. In February 1849 it was renamed after the circus that stood nearby on the Champs-Élysées. That circus, built by the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff in 1841–1843, was known as the Cirque d'Été (Summer Circus) after 1870 and was demolished in 1900.^[1][2]

In his 1910 guide to the streets of the 8th arrondissement, the Marquis de Rochegude wrote that André Le Nôtre, the gardener who designed the gardens of Versailles, once had a country house on the site of number 16, next door to the hotel.^[2]

The hotel says the building at number 18 was built in 1897 as a hôtel particulier, a private town house for one family, but it does not name the architect or the first owner. The hotel also says that the fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who died in 2020, owned the building at one time.^[3][5]

City of Paris planning permits show that by 1990 the building stood empty and had formerly been a hôtel meublé, a hotel that rented furnished rooms. Permits granted that year allowed all of its floors and its roof to be demolished and the building to be rebuilt inside as a furnished hotel with 12 suites. In 2010 the city approved further work on the building as a hotel, including new windows and a new elevator, and more applications for hotel work were filed in 2015.^[4]

The Roberto Naldi Collection, a hotel group that also runs hotels in Rome and Lugano, announced in 2016 that it would open the Splendide Royal at number 18 that autumn. The hotel says it opened in December 2016 and joined Relais & Châteaux the same year, and that Tosca opened in 2017.^[5][3]