Bulgari Hotel Paris
For its new hotel in the City of Light, Bulgari fused Italian design and French savoir-faire to create an urbane retreat.
I happened to check in to the new Bulgari Hotel Paris on the day they let me out of a clinic for some minor surgery that didn’t feel so minor to me. This was good and bad. You can do worse than recover from surgery at a five-star luxury hotel. On the other hand, I felt like Greta Garbo in the movie Grand Hotel: “I vant to be alone.” I arrived by taxi a little banged up and out of sorts. Inside me, an angry little man was muttering: Do not ask me how I am or I will kill you. And then, mercifully, no one asked. I was shepherded straight up to my room in a brisk, friendly way, but with none of the intrusive niceties of standard hotel protocol.
This is not an oversight on Bulgari’s part. I was talking with Sylvain Ercoli, the hotel’s Franco-Italian managing director, soon after. “How many times do they ask you when you arrive at a hotel, ‘Did you have a good trip?’ Why? If I had a good trip, it’s written on my face. If I had a bad trip, why talk about it? It’s our metier to find out if you don’t want to see anybody and go to your room immediately,” he told me. This is a refreshing attitude, even if you’re not recovering from a medical procedure. Paris has plenty of splendid grand hotels. The Ritz, the Crillon and the George V pretty much created the template. In his time, Ercoli has run each of them. “I know that formula. The mistake you make as the new guy in a business like ours is to say, ‘I’m going to do it in the same style but better than them.’ Forget it. It would take you a century.”
What Bulgari proposes is a kind of easy-going, dolce vita alternative to Parisian pomp. The vibe is ’50s Rome or Milan: unsplashy, unfussy and comfortable. An un-statement more than a statement. Bulgari is aiming for the ineffable quality that the Renaissance writer Castiglione called sprezzatura: “A certain nonchalance so as to conceal all art... and make (it) appear to be without effort.” You get the idea when you pull up to the front door. You’re in Paris’s so-called Golden Triangle neighbourhood, so named for the abundance of high-end stores (including Bulgari, of course), restaurants and hotels within its narrow borders (the triangle is delineated by the Champs Elysées, the Avenue Montaigne and the Avenue George V). Here is where you find the most opulent real estate in Paris.
Just across the street is the Four Seasons Hotel George V, an Art Deco pile built in 1928 that is gilded and storied. In the midst of all this, the Bulgari hotel stands out by not standing out. It occupies a charmless former 1970s office building that had a bunch of insurance companies for tenants. “It was not very nice,” says Ercoli. “We know what we don’t want in a building – nothing Neoclassical, nothing Baroque. We want something that looks, if I dare say it, Mussolinian – very Italo-Milanese chic.” Which is what the transformed structure looks like now – a blocky, unadorned façade with huge windows.
The hotel’s décor embodies the same spirit. Since Bulgari opened its first hotel in Milan in 2004, it has entrusted its crisp design to Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel, who run their own Milanese design studio. The yards and yards of straw marquetry, eucalyptus panelling and creamy marble clearly cost a mint if you stop to think about it, except you don’t. The furniture is the sleek, modernist Italian kind you could have bought from B&B Italia and Maxalto ages ago. You can still buy it today. Most of the furniture Citterio designed for Bulgari is for sale in the current B&B and Maxalto catalogues. The 25-metre pool in the vast two-level spa achieves its sense of calm with little ornament besides mosaic tiles in shades of green and four sand-blasted glass columns.
You barely register Bulgari’s interior design as you pass through, but it somehow manages to generate an inaudible hum of moneyed well-being. It’s more about feeling good than looking good. This is the way Bulgari started in Milan and it has remained the house style through subsequent ventures in Bali, Shanghai, Beijing, London and Dubai. Citterio will doubtless follow the same blueprint for Bulgari’s planned hotels in Tokyo, Los Angeles and Miami over the next few years. It is Bulgari’s Italian DNA, and its low-key chic blends seamlessly across cultures. In Paris, for instance, the hotel’s stone facing uses sharply outlined ashlar masonry typical of the city (you’ll also find it in the Louvre and the Petit Palais).
Unveiled last December, the Paris property has only 76 rooms (including 56 suites and a penthouse) so there’s a minimal bustle. The rooms are cavernous, ranging from 42 square Milanese, which is basically just a breaded veal cutlet. It sounds dead easy to make, but it’s a dish highly metres to 400 square metres for the penthouse (not counting its 600-square-metre susceptible to both overcooking and sogginess. terrace garden). My squash court-sized room on the fourth floor faced west over the avenue, and sunlight flooded in through floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a Romito’s version was, frankly, a marvel, with the juiciness of the meat and the crispness of the breading warm April day, and I was pleased to find that those big windows actually opened; in near-perfect balance. in many new hotels they don’t. “It’s like going into somebody’s home,” says Ercoli, Ercoli explains later what it took to get it that way, Oand he’s right if that somebody was Marcello Mastroianni.
On the other hand, you never forget who owns the joint. There’s no art on the hotel walls — too attention-seeking — but there are plenty of old photos of Italian movie stars wearing Bulgari jewellery. Sitting on a marble table in every room are coffee-table books celebrating Bulgari in 2011 for $US5.2 billion. The mini-bar in my room was tucked into what resembled a large Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. I guess they get to do that.
LVMH recently opened another lavish property in Paris and its contrast to the Bulgari venture couldn’t be more stark. The Cheval Blanc hotel occupies part of the Samaritaine department store, an Art Deco masterpiece whose honeycomb of glass windows makes it instantly recognisable. It’s the opposite of understated. The main lobby is all bright colours and big, bold artwork. Everything screams “Look at me!” I’m not knocking it. In its own big-gestured way, it works wonderfully, too. I just wouldn’t recommend it post-surgery.
Not surprisingly, the hotel excels at Italy’s aperitivo, with a flurry of antipasti including plates of crudo and crostini and drinks like a Milano-Livorno, a bracing blend of Campari, Galliano, citrus and saffron. It has only one restaurant, which saves you choosing where to eat. The headliner chef, a must these days, is Niko Romito, whose home base in Italy’s Abruzzo region has three Michelin stars. In keeping with the Bulgari gestalt, the menu is comparatively simple and the tone relaxed. The chef’s signature dishes are a vegetable lasagna and a veal Milanese, neither one seemingly designed to produce an audible gasp. I tried the veal.
Milanese, which is basically just a breaded veal cutlet. It sounds dead easy to make, but it’s a dish highly susceptible to both overcooking and sogginess. Romito’s version was, frankly, a marvel, with the juiciness of the meat and the crispness of the breading in near-perfect balance.
Ercoli explains later what it took to get it that way, which if I recall required several days of pre-poaching, freezing and thawing before a last-minute application of the breadcrumbs using rice starch instead of egg. The waiter, I’m happy to say, shared none of this when he put it before me. “I just hate it when I order something in a restaurant and they try to explain to me what’s in it,” says Ercoli. “Every time they put down a plate, they have to tell you a story.” Amen to that.
Bulgari has an official mantra for its hotels – “impeccable, authentic and yet informal” – but Ercoli doesn’t want to get religious about that, either. “It can become a gimmick. If you don’t really know how to say buongiorno correctly” – he stops here to trill his “r” as only an Italian can – “then just say bonjour. We’re in France after all. Don’t push it.”
Did I recover more speedily from surgery as a result of my brief stay? No, I did not. The Bulgari is a hotel, not a miracle healer. I will tell you that it almost made me forget I had been sliced open. “Oh, that little thing?” I said to somebody with an Italianate wave of the hand. “Non è niente.”
This story appeared in Travel + Luxury issue 8. Explore the digital edition here.
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