Unique luxury hotels, fashionable travel and much more

If you find yourself staying in one of the luxury hotels in Paris this spring, consider spending an evening in a piano bar during your city break. You can always rely on a hotel piano bar to offer a sophisticated atmosphere and is the perfect end to a day of sightseeing with a cocktail and some relaxing live music tinkling in the background.

The Saint-Germain-des-Prés arrondissement is a good place to find nightlife and the Hotel Bel-Ami has an excellent piano bar with live music from 6pm. Still in the 6th arrondissement, the Bar de Lutetia at the hotel of the same name offers piano music and “lute-jazz” on other evenings. This Art Deco luxury hotel on Blvd Raspail is well known as a landmark building on the Left Bank.

The Hotel de Crillon on Place de la Concorde, one of Luxique’s top luxury hotels in Paris, has a lively bar where pianists Joel and Bernard play until 1am. It is the ideal place to hang out before or after dining in the Michelin star restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs.

For a more British influence, try the Dukes Bar at Hotel Westminster on rue de la Paix. Throughout the week there is a pianist for the cocktail hour from 6.30 to 9.30pm and at weekends there’s a jazz singer until late.

Those looking for a luxury hotel bar with cultural connections will find just what they’re looking for at the piano bar at Hotel de Banville. Named after the poet Theodore de Banville the lobby bar has superb entertainment with pianist Franck Monbaylet, guitarist Frederic Kakon and vocalist Marianne Moreau.

by Gillian at Luxique Luxury Hotels

The Palace of Versailles outside Paris is to transform one of its satellite buildings into a luxury hotel.

L’hôtel du Grand Contrôle, the traditional home of the chateau’s treasurers, is to be converted into a luxury hotel with 23 bedrooms. Some will look out over The Orangerie, the palace’s elaborate greenhouse, and others will have a view of the Swiss ornamental lake. The hotel could be ready as early as the end of next year.

A concession has been granted to the Belgian company Ivy International SA to renovate and develop the building, which dates back to the 17th century but is currently in a dilapidated state. The work is expected to cost 5.5 million euros (£4.6 million/$7.3 million).

Versailles, a UNESCO World Heritage site deemed one of the crowning achievements of 18th-century French art, is one of Europe’s most popular tourist attractions.

The development paves the way for a series of French projects aimed at exploiting the economic potential of listed buildings while securing their renovation.

Another royal palace, the Chateau of Fontainbleau, south of Paris, is preparing to appeal for bids to develop its listed Heronniere barracks next year. “We have to find a purpose for these buildings to avoid them falling into ruin,” said Jean-Francois Hebert, President of Fontainbleau. “One of the ways will be to set up an upmarket hotel complex.”

by Andy Moreton/AFP

Luxique offers you a choice of accommodation at some 70 luxury hotels in Paris,including the Trianon Palace in Versailles.

The French have had to concede that London offers a better experience for tourists than Paris.

The Paris-Il-de-France Regional Tourism Committee commissioned a survey to explore ways to boost international visitors. To the surprise of many, London was placed ahead of five other European cities, including Paris, Rome and Berlin.

The report found that tourists liked London better than other cities for its taxis, restaurants and landmarks, including Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye.

The city was given an impressive score of 82 out of 100 for the welcome it offered visitors from abroad. Paris – officially the world’s most popular tourist destination in terms of number of visitors – tied in second place on 79 with Amsterdam.

So what’s so wrong with Paris? Well, public transport is considered poor, with tickets difficult to buy and the Metro looking increasingly old and dirty.

Paris hotels – which have shot up in price in the decade or so since the introduction of the euro – were also found wanting, with a total mark of 74 per cent, compared with 89 per cent for London.

One fault that was found with Londoners was that so few were able to speak a foreign language.

by Andy Moreton

Paris or London? Do both! Luxique can direct you to the best luxury hotels in Paris and London – and at the best available rates.

There might be severe belt-tightening and worried workers protesting on the streets, but Paris will still see four new five-star luxury hotels in the next fifteen months.

The first opened this week. The Royal Monceau, near the Arc de Triomphe, was previously a standard class hotel, but it’s been transformed by the celebrated French designer, Philippe Starck, into a luxury hotel in Paris, art gallery and club for what he calls ‘the smart tribe’.

Starck said that the hotel – now owned by the sovereign fund of Qatar and managed by the Singapore-based Raffles hotel group – was an attempt to recreate French modernity.

The three other luxury hotels are also being built (or rebuilt) with Asian or Middle Eastern capital. The Shangri-La, due to open in December, has been created by a Hong Kong-based group from a private mansion on the Avenue d’Iéna, with stunning views over the Seine to the Eiffel Tower.

The Mandarin Oriental (another Hong Kong funded project) will open next summer on the Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, while the old Majestic Hotel on the Avenue Kléber is being converted (Qatari money again) into a 200-room ‘palace’, to be called the Peninsula-Majestic.

Paris is littered with beautiful sites, shops and expensive restaurants but is, surprisingly, under-supplied with top-of-the-range hotels. It has only seven establishments in the ‘super-luxury’ class, compared with 14 in London.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique’s travel experts have hand picked 63 luxury hotels in Paris and they’re available to book at the best possible rates.

Parisians have been marking the 100th anniversary of the day the Seine burst its banks and filled the city with torrents of muddy water.

Thousands of residents were forced from their homes and power was cut off for months.

To commemorate the 1910 flood, Paris’s Galerie des Bibliotheques is exhibiting a collection of photos, postcards and witness accounts. Among them are sepia shots of bowler-hatted men travelling piggyback, trousers hoisted up and knee-deep in water; people pulling up to Notre Dame cathedral in boats, and food being delivered by ladder to second-floor apartment windows.

But while present-day Parisians view the old scenes with a smile, there are warnings that it could happen again – and be ten times worse, despite various flood defence measures put in place over the years.

“The flood is unavoidable,” said Louis Hubert, director for the Paris region at France’s Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development. “What we can simply say is that we are almost certain to see new considerable floods, but we don’t know when.”

Paris museums such as the Louvre have a flood plan by which priceless objects are removed to a safe house in a town north-west of Paris – if they get enough warning.

by Andy Moreton

The exhibition at Galerie des Bibliotheques is on until March 28th. And if you’re planning a visit to France’s romantic and historic capital city, browse through Luxique’s unrivalled selection of luxury Paris hotels.

As surveys go, this one is pretty gross. Our friends at Tripadvisor.com have come up with a top five tourist attractions that could be bad for your health as they’re so germ-ridden. Here they are in reverse order:

At number 5 is the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where celebrities leave their hand- and footprints for posterity. Apparently, it’s covered in grime from the countless visitors who see if their hands and feet match those of the stars.

St Mark’s is a beautiful square in Venice, but it’s always suffered from a surfeit of hungry pigeons and the mess they leave behind. That brings it in at number 4.

At number 3 is Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Paris. People clearly like to kiss it, because it’s covered with lipstick prints. Yuk!

A wall outside Market Theatre in Seattle was placed runner-up in the survey. Since 1990, tens of thousands of people have stuck their unwanted chewing gum to the wall, turning it into a tourist attraction. The display was started by people waiting in line to visit the theatre. The wall has been scraped clean twice but is still covered with gum, some moulded into shapes and faces.

But the ‘favourite’ tourist attraction for picking up germs is the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle near Cork in the Irish Republic. More than 400,000 tourists a year literally bend over backwards to kiss the Stone, as legend has it that it will give you the gift of eloquent speech.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique can promise you ultra-hygienic facilities at top-class hotels close to all the tourist attractions mentioned above: browse our selection of luxury hotels in Los Angeles, Venice, Paris, Seattle and Cork.

The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has outlined his blueprint for a bigger, greener Paris.

As I reported earlier in the year, ten leading international architects were asked to look ahead to the future and design a plan for the French capital that would please both the eye and the environment.

Last week, President Sarkozy unveiled those ideas and declared it a priority to reshape the city and its suburbs into a single ‘Greater Paris’, a 21st-century metropolis able to compete as an economic hub with London, New York and Tokyo. He said the government would draw up a Bill by October to release 35 billion euros (£31 billion / $46 billion) of new funds.

What seems certain to be developed is an 80-mile automatic metro line looping around the city, bringing the alienated outlying districts – the banlieues – into the picture. There would also be more flexible planning laws that would allow as many as 70,000 new housing units a year.

One of the most ambitious of the plans was by the French architect, Antoine Grumbach, who foresaw the city extending to the Channel port of Le Havre via Rouen along the Seine, maximising the green possibilities of the river and with a fast rail link.

Mr Sarkozy liked that idea and also said that he’d favour lifting the ban on building skyscrapers in Paris. “Why ban building towers if they are beautiful, if they fit harmoniously into the urban landscape?” he said. “The only reproachable thing is ugliness.”

by Andy Moreton

Luxique has a super selection of luxury Paris hotels – both classic and modern.

The beret was once the headgear of choice for any self-respecting Frenchman. It became almost a cartoon cliché.

Now, after years in decline, the beret is making a comeback, with manufacturers reporting a doubling in sales. One, Blancq-Olibet, based in south-west France, faced closure less than a decade ago, but is now making 300,000 berets a year.

And it’s the young who seem to be embracing them as a ‘new’ fashion trend. Bernard Fargues, the chairman of another company, Béatex, said the buyers were mostly those dubbed bobos or the bourgeois-bohème (yuppies). “They’re buying berets as a sign of authenticity and a link to rural France, where their grandparents probably lived and worked,” he said.

French style commentator Patricia Jourdain thought that as well as French pride, it might also be a backlash against an increasingly Americanised world: “The beret is as far removed as the baseball cap and other manifestations of US culture as you can get,” she said.

Ms Jourdain said that rather than being worn solely by country people or intellectuals as in the past, the beret was now an extremely chic fashion item. Many models had worn them at Paris Fashion Week.

by Andy Moreton

Check out Luxique’s selection of luxury hotels in Paris and throughout France. C’est magnifique!

Some of the world’s leading architects have spent the past nine months creating their vision for the Paris of the future and have now have presented their ideas to the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The President had asked them to project 20 years ahead and dream up the world’s most sustainable metropolis.

One crucial aim is to end the isolation of central Paris, with its two million inhabitants, which is cut off from the six million living in suburbs just outside its ring road, le périphérique. As one of the eminent architects, Lord Rogers, observed: “I know of no other big city where the heart is so detached from its arms and legs.”

The ideas are many and varied. One scheme, proposed by architect Roland Castro, envisages new cultural landmarks in a capital shaped like a huge eight-petal flower and with a New York-style Central Park.

Yves Liot would like to create 20 sustainable ‘towns’ of 500,000 within the Paris area. He would double the number of forests and bring fields to the outskirts so that urban dwellers could cultivate their own fruit and vegetables.

Christophe de Portzamparc proposes building four economic ‘buds’ in an archipelago around the capital and transferring a huge European railway station to Aubervilliers, north of Paris, modelled on London’s Euro terminal, St Pancras.

An exhibition of scale models will be shown to the public from April to November and there will be a public debate.

by Andy Moreton

The city of today is pretty special too – use Luxique to reserve a room at a spectacular luxury Paris hotel.

It’s depressing to have to report that the enterprising Vélib bicycle rental scheme in Paris that I wrote about last year has become a victim of theft and vandalism.

Half of the original fleet of 15,000 distinctive grey bikes have disappeared, presumed stolen; several have been spotted in Romania. In addition, more than 11,000 have been vandalised – tyre-slashing is the most common problem, although some bikes have been found hanging from trees or dumped in rivers.

JCDecaux, the advertising company that supplies them to the city, has been repairing or replacing most of the original cycles. This led to it complaining that the city was making all the money from the rentals while the operating firm was bearing all the costs. The Mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has now agreed to pay for a proportion of the stolen and damaged stock.

Vélib - a contraction of the French words for bicycle and freedom - remains popular with the city’s residents and tourists – in its first year of operation, it made €20 million (£17.5 million / $26 million).
But as well as theft and vandalism, the cycles have fallen victim to a craze called ‘Vélib extreme.’

Young riders use them for daredevil stunts that they film and post on the internet, set to rock music. They include jumps and fast descents down the long stairs of the Montmartre hill.

by Andy Moreton

If you’re planning a visit to France’s romantic capital city, browse through Luxique’s unrivalled selection of luxury hotels in Paris.