Everyone wants to party with Jean-Louis Costes but just try and get a table at one of his Paris hotspots
Hôtel Costes, built inside a 19th-century listed building on Paris’s most prestigious shopping street, was an overnight hit from the day it opened. Meet the hotelier the A-list has on speed dial.
Paris is the world’s capital of fashion, an industry obsessed with change, yet the city’s most fashionable hotel has remained unchanged for a quarter of a century. Its name: Hôtel Costes.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider who stayed in Costes during this Euro summer’s fashion season. Austin Butler with official squeeze Kaia Gerber; Leonardo DiCaprio in a mammoth suite in the new wing; Jack Dorsey with a generous top-floor room, and Naomi Campbell, who takes an increasingly large space as her family grows, even if no one is very sure who pays for it.
This story is in the September issue of WISH magazine, out on September 1 with The Australian.
Costes, built inside a 19th-century listed building on Paris’s most prestigious shopping street, rue St Honoré, was an overnight hit from the day it opened in 1995. In an era of minimalism, its maximalist style by architect Jacques Garcia stood out like a brass band at a church funeral; an aesthetic once described as a turbo-charged neo-Gothic meets Egyptian exoticism and the madness of Napoleon III.
The jewel in the crown is its garden restaurant, a catwalk of vanities at night, and one of the hardest places in Europe at which to secure a table. It is decorated in a boudoir style with plush red velvet chairs and white linen-covered tables, and illuminated by lights held by statutes of young pharaohs. Plus, its staff are always beautiful people, the sort of willowy and distant French beauties that leave some guests a little tongue-tied.
It’s been a remarkable run of form, all overseen by Jean-Louis Costes, a permanent presence who nonetheless shuns the limelight, even as his bonhomie underlies his enormous pride in his unique hotel.
“I have one great advantage; I don’t speak English. That way, I guarantee that it’s a typical French hotel, which is essential,” explains Costes over Coca Cola (normal) in a new restaurant he is planning in the back of the hotel.
So great is the obsession with remaining French that he refuses to have an English menu, instead just putting one word in English after each French dish.
“I remember when we opened in Saks [New York] and my staff started translating the menus into English. And I’m like, ‘What on earth are you doing? Are you crazy?’ To me, these dishes are not translatable. It cannot be done. So, just give them one English word – salad, steak or chicken – so people are on the right path. Anglais should be minimal, minimal, minimal,” chuckles Costes about L’Avenue at Saks, one of his many expansion projects, opened in 2019 and designed by Philippe Starck.
These days, there are three elements to his legendary hotel in Paris: the original Costes St Honoré, Costes Castiglione and the new Costes Mont-Thabor. “Great architects are not that expensive, but they add a lot of value. With the addition of Mont-Thabor, we will be the size of the great Paris hotels, like the Ritz or Mandarin, with 150 rooms in 17,000 square-metres,” insists this country boy made good.
Each wing is a remarkable study in contrasts. Costes Castiglione was designed by the master of hyper-graphic French opulence Christian Liaigre, who has created homes for the likes of Calvin Klein and Rupert Murdoch and New York’s Mercer Hotel. While to decorate the new Costes restaurant in Mont-Thabor, Costes invited back Garcia. The addition of Castiglione in 2020 means room prices now range from €600 to €10,000 per night.
In fact, it would be hard to visit Paris without spending some time in some establishment owned by Jean-Louis or his elder brother Gilbert, former Commercial Court of Paris judge and operator of the Beaumarly hospitality and hotel group with his son Thierry. If you want the best view of the Louvre, then visit their Le Café Marly, extending from a gilded Grand Empire dining room to a 60-metre terrace underneath the museum’s loggia. Or Café Beaubourg – constructed in five linked 17th-century houses, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, winner of the Pritzker Prize – Nobel Prize for architecture – and overlooking the Centre Pompidou.
Elsewhere in Paris, Jean-Louis Costes operates L’Avenue, designed by Jacques Grange (creator of Yves Saint Laurent’s homes), La Societé in St Germain, and Club Marigny, with its splendid terrace outside a famed theatre on the Champs-Élysées.
Youngest brother Guy Costes oversees Plage Palace, a sleek white retro-modernist hotel on a Mediterranean beach near Montpellier where the boys swam in their youth.
“I was 16 when I came to Paris and began as an apprentice chef in a brasserie de la Gare de l’Est. Eventually, I raised enough to buy an old ugly bistro in Les Halles. And I asked myself, ‘How can I change this?’ That’s when a local introduced me to Philippe Starck, and I told him, ‘You and I are going to make Costes the best café in the world.’ And we did. No one has done any better since,” he sniffs with classic Gallic self-confidence.
Café Costes, opened by Jean-Louis and Gilbert, was famed for its huge Metropolis clock, hyper-modernist chairs and tables, green terrazzo floor and first ever wall-style urinal. It became the hippest café in Europe. But when Jean-Louis opened HÔtel Costes, he surprised everyone by choosing the obscure Jacques Garcia as designer.
“Garcia was someone in Starck’s milieu. But I was no longer in love with Starck. So, I betrayed him for Garcia. I have never been very faithful. Twenty years later, I betrayed Garcia for Liaigre. My work is a long love story, with a lot of break-ups. And people get very, very angry. But a decade later, you become their friends again. Starck is a genius, so it’s not always easy to work with him. But what a career. What ideas. Believe me, Garcia was not best pleased when I worked with Liaigre, but now he is back to create this,” explains Costes, gesturing to the new garden restaurant.
“People should feel flattered when they come to one of my places. In my view, this hotel is the best in Paris. It’s maybe not the grandest hotel, but it is the most elegant, and the happiest. We don’t have a three-star restaurant and we don’t want one. The cuisine is easy to understand,” says the hotelier of the menu that is very much contemporary French with an Asian twist.
Costes’ clientele varies with the seasons. During fashion week, Valentino designer Pierpaolo Piccioli, who likes a smoke, holds court in the southwest corner of the garden, Diesel president Renzo Rosso likes a big central table, while Joel Rosenthal, whose JAR label is regarded by Parisians as the world’s best jeweller, has a daily spot just inside on the left. In October, during the FIAC contemporary art fair, Costes is crammed with dealers and collectors.
During Roland-Garros, les tennis men dominate. During the Prix de l’Arc du Triomphe in Longchamps, the horsey crowd takes over. For the Paris Air show, Costes is packed with suits doing billion-dollar deals, taking big rooms and drinking big wines. When Ireland last beat France in Paris with a famous last-second drop goal in the Six Nations rugby championship, the family of fullback Rob Kearney had a garden table for 12.
But in the fireplace room with its ceramic chimney and naturalist nude oil paintings, it’s resolutely Parisian. More than 80 per cent of the hotel guests are foreign, but when it comes to the restaurant, Costes likes to keep it French. “We pay attention to maintain our French customers, so it’s 50/50 French and foreigners. It’s a war in a sense. Because if we don’t, we’ll be like all the other hotels, which are sad since their clientele is all foreigners. When that happens there is no ambience. Believe me, the Mandarin, Hyatt, Meurice and Ritz all want to put their foreigners out. So, we are at war with their concierges, telling them, ‘Sorry we cannot take your foreigners’. Eh, no,” he sniffs.
No one has ever never taken over the whole restaurant, though favoured cool stars such as Dita Von Teese are very occasionally allowed to create a big centre table in the garden. For the average visitor to Paris, actually getting a table is a little like passing a motion in the UN or getting an audience with Louis XIV. It’s that difficult. Bookings can only be made 48 hours before your visit, although a very few VIPs are given a secret phone number, but only if they themselves are dining.
Says long-time Costes habitué, Australian investor and bon vivant Cameron O’Reilly: “In a city famed for its terraces, Costes has the best terrace in Paris. The entrance is like a speakeasy, and inside it’s the ultimate in French taste. It’s like Balzac meets a fashion spectacular. It’s unbeatable really.”
Even covid didn’t hurt Costes, as Jean-Louis used the pandemic to amalgamate smaller rooms into suites.
Costes likes to call himself “the kid brother,” to his more deep-pocketed rivals. Hôtel Plaza Athenée and Le Meurice belong to the Sultan of Brunei; a Saudi royal prince owns the Hôtel de Crillon and Mohamed Al Fayed still rules at the nearby Ritz Paris. However, the hotelier will nevertheless admit to modest admiration of a few of his peers.
“I rate the Ritz, Plaza and the Crillon in Paris. But I don’t really like the work they do inside them. I used to be a waiter in the Relais restaurant inside Plaza Athenée. The place I most enjoyed working. I loved the cuisine, the ambience and noise. But instead, like so many grand hotels, the Plaza Athenée has hired a Michelin three-star chef. If I were them, I would throw them all out the door. Put them in the nick. Rich people, whether in wealth or experience, have seen everything, and eaten in three-star restaurants,” he argues.
There are only 350 covers in the whole Costes restaurant, and everyone wants the terrace. But there are only 90 covers there, and the hotel has 100 rooms. That can make things pretty tricky. Especially when next year Costes will add another 40 rooms.
For such a success, the hotelier remans modest, and tight-lipped on recent rumours about a planned Hôtel Costes in London – where he is speaking to the Cadogan Estates – or a L’Avenue restaurant in São Paulo.
Wine wise, he is also modest. “I chose the wine list. I know little about wine, but I know the wine that sells. I have marketing sensibility, rather than a gastronomic sensibility,” he giggles with understatement, considering his prices.
This past year, Jack Dorsey, after selling Twitter to Elon Musk, pretty much lived in Costes Castiglione in a huge suite. He was much loved by staff for his generous 100 per cent tips, doubly impressive given he drinks Pétrus at €8000 a bottle. “That did create a few problems, especially when one waitress ended up with a €16,000 tip. With that sort of money flying around those girls can be vicious. Oh, la la!” recalls one insider.
Few in Paris emphasise how important the waitresses are more than Costes himself.
“There are key elements. No uniform. They chose how they look. They can wear Zara or wear Alexander McQueen, and they don’t have to wear black. But they can never wear pants, never. Though yesterday, two girls turned up and I said, ‘Non, non, non!’. They were badly dressed. So, I sent them home. That’s not how it works. Costes girls have to make a real effort.”
