The building is 151 years older than the hotel. Louis XV commissioned Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1758 to raise twin stone palaces on what is now the Place de la Concorde; one became the Hôtel de la Marine, the other a private residence held by the Crillon family for more than a century. Louis XVI was guillotined on the square in front of it in 1793. It opened as a hotel on 11 March 1909 ⚑ some accounts say 12 March.
The house
The Société du Louvre bought the mansion from the Polignac heirs in 1904 and sold much of the furniture — including a boudoir by Pâris now in the Metropolitan Museum. Walter-André Destailleur converted it, and the first guests arrived in 1909.
In early 1919 the international delegations drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations in its salons. In the Second World War it served first as Allied headquarters and then under requisition by the German command. The Taittinger champagne family bought it in 1954.
In March 2013 Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud acquired the house, reportedly for €250m, and closed it for a four-year restoration of about the same sum. It reopened in 2017 under Rosewood, with two apartments by Karl Lagerfeld. 78 rooms and 46 suites; monument historique since 1900.
What distinguishes it
The building is the oldest; the hotel is not. The Crillon is routinely called the oldest of the Paris palaces on the strength of a 1758 façade. It became a hotel in 1909 — eleven years after the Ritz and seventy-four after Le Meurice. The register distinguishes the two claims, as it does for Procope and Florian.
A country was drafted in the salons. The Covenant of the League of Nations was written here in early 1919. No other house in this Library was the room in which an international order was composed.
It changed sides in one war. Allied headquarters, then requisitioned by the German command. A hotel on the Place de la Concorde cannot be neutral about the square it faces.
Champagne held it for sixty years. The Taittinger family from 1954 — a producer, not a hotelier, and the longest single ownership in the house’s history as a hotel.
Riyadh holds it now. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah since March 2013; Rosewood operates. Of the four grand hotels that founded the category, this is the third owned from the Gulf.
A guest looking for a hotel that feels its age will find the opposite: the 2013–17 restoration was comprehensive, and what stands is a very careful new interior inside an eighteenth-century shell. The Place de la Concorde is also one of the loudest addresses in Paris, and the rooms that face it pay for the view.
Signature rooms and dates
Competitive landscape
Editorial note — The 1758 Gabriel commission, the 1904 purchase from the Polignac heirs, the Destailleur conversion, the 1909 opening, the 1919 League of Nations drafting, the 1954 Taittinger purchase, the 2013 sale and the 2017 reopening checked against Rosewood corporate history and Wikipedia; verified August 2026. ⚑ The opening is given as both 11 and 12 March 1909 and the register carries the flag.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.