Four Seasons Hotel George V – Three Keys on the Champs-Élysées

On the avenue that carries its name, a hundred metres from the Champs-Élysées, Four Seasons Hotel George V has set the measure for Parisian luxury hotel-keeping since 1928. Designed in the Art Deco style with a stone façade of sober, monumental lines, the hotel was built for American businessman Joel Hillman and run from the outset by André Terrail, owner of La Tour d'Argent. It survived the Wall Street crash, the German occupation and decades of Parisian high society before Saudi investor Al-Waleed bin Talal rebuilt it from the foundations up and installed Four Seasons in December 1999. Today the MICHELIN Guide gives it Three MICHELIN Keys, and its three restaurants carry six MICHELIN Stars between them – a concentration of gastronomy rare even among Paris's palace hotels, anchored by Christian Le Squer's three-starred Le Cinq.

01The house

The hotel that became the George V opened its doors in 1928, financed at a cost of $31 million by the American businessman Joel Hillman and designed by the architect Georges Wybo, who had already built the Casino de Deauville and rebuilt the Printemps department store after its 1921 fire. The young establishment was managed by André Terrail, owner of La Tour d'Argent, and marked its arrival with a tea reception on 25 May 1928 attended by around 100 financiers and Parisian society figures.

Hillman lost the hotel to his lenders after the 1929 crash, and in 1931 the banker François Dupré bought the property, commissioning a new wing from the original architects and filling the rooms with Flemish tapestries, Boulle furniture, a Renoir and a Dufy. During the Occupation the hotel became an unlikely literary crossroads: a wartime round-table there brought together the German writer Ernst Jünger, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the French writers Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau and Henry de Montherlant.

He signed a management agreement with Four Seasons on 1 November 1997, and the renamed Four Seasons Hotel George V reopened on 18 December 1999 — the renovation that gave the hotel its 50,000-bottle wine cellar, built into the former stone quarries beneath the building that once supplied the stone for the Trocadéro.

02Rooms and suites

The hotel counts 244 rooms, including 59 suites, all reworked by interior designer Pierre-Yves Rochon into what Forbes Travel Guide has called the largest guest-room layouts in Paris, residential in feel with curated bookshelves and discreet home-automation systems built in behind the classical panelling. Many of the upper-floor rooms and suites look straight across the rooftops to the Eiffel Tower, a view the hotel treats as one of its signature amenities.

Insider tip

Book Le Cinq well ahead; the Golden Triangle location puts couture, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower within walking distance.

At the top of the range, suites such as the Royal Suite and the Penthouse open onto private terraces over the Avenue George V and the hotel's marble inner courtyard, continuing the original 1920s plan of a sunlit courtyard ringed by eight storeys. The suite names — Eiffel Tower Suite, Parisian Suite, Presidential Suite — map the hotel's two preoccupations: the skyline outside and the idea of an ideal Parisian apartment within.

03Where to eat

Le Cinq is the hotel's gastronomic heart: chef Christian Le Squer, born in Plouhinec in Brittany, has led the kitchen since 2014 and has held three MICHELIN Stars there since 2016, cooking from Breton langoustines and onion soup to his signature line-fished sea bass with caviar and buttermilk, a dish drawn from his own childhood. Dinner is served Tuesday to Saturday, and the dining room sits above a cellar of some 50,000 bottles overseen by David Piquet, recently named Director of Sommellerie. In the MICHELIN Guide France 2026 edition Le Cinq marked ten consecutive years at three stars, a run the kitchen itself has called a matter of constant reinvention rather than routine.

Two more dining rooms complete the picture. L'Orangerie, the smaller and more intimate of the two, and Le George, built around Mediterranean dishes designed for sharing, together with Le Cinq give the hotel six MICHELIN Stars across three restaurants — one of the highest concentrations of starred cooking under a single Paris roof. For something lighter, La Galerie serves French and classic dishes with modern touches beneath the hotel's famously theatrical floral displays.

04The bar

Le Bar keeps a deliberately intimate scale next to the restaurants' grandeur, its panelling and lighting also drawn up by Pierre-Yves Rochon. It functions as the quiet counterpoint to Le Cinq and Le George — a room for an aperitif or a nightcap rather than a scene, with the hotel's wine cellar never far from mind given the scale of the collection it draws on.

05Spa and wellbeing

Le Spa, redesigned in 2018 under Pierre-Yves Rochon, pairs a 17-metre swimming pool with a 34°C vitality pool, separate hammams for men and women, and six treatment rooms including one couple's suite, with menus built around Swiss and French protocols. A fitness centre with integrated training technology and a hair salon round out the wellness floor — a relatively compact spa by palace-hotel standards, but one built for precision rather than scale.

06The neighbourhood

The hotel sits at the edge of the Golden Triangle, the designer quarter bounded by the Champs-Élysées, Avenue Marceau and Avenue Montaigne, with the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde and the Eiffel Tower all within easy walking distance. The George V métro station on line 1 sits almost at the door, making the hotel as much a base for an afternoon among the couture houses of Montaigne as for an evening at Le Cinq.

07Making the most of a stay

The hotel's visual signature is its flowers: artistic director Jeff Leatham fills the lobby and the courtyard with sculptural arrangements renewed constantly, the kind of detail that turns a walk through reception into part of the experience rather than a prelude to it. Afternoon tea at La Galerie, beneath those same displays, is as close as the George V comes to an institution within an institution. For logistics, the concierge desk is worth leaning on heavily — reserving a table at Le Cinq, or simply working out the fastest route to the next fitting on Avenue Montaigne, is what the staff here do best.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.