I love a good revival story and even more so when there are archival photos to illustrate the evolution.
In March, I visited the renovated Hilton Paris Opéra, a soaring hotel adjacent to the Saint Lazare train station. Its bandages had just been removed after an 18 month transformation (for the cool price tag of $50 million) and I was there to review the space for Afar Magazine. Formerly the Concorde, the 125 year old hotel was the first to have electricity in Paris and had a strong legacy as a business and social hub.
What left me slack-jawed was less the fact that the hotel had been completely redesigned, updated to beautiful effect, but rather that in an instant, my sole memory of sitting in the Terminus Café some seven years ago, still the name of the street-side restaurant seen in the photo below, came flooding back with vivid detail. I was there to meet a friend for a quick drink before she had to head home to the suburbs, hopping onto the RER A which she picked up right at the train station mere feet away. I remember thinking to myself, what a strange place to have an apéro! The neighborhoods situated immediately around train stations aren’t typically the cleanest, safest or most appealing destinations but beyond that, the café itself was in serious decline. It was a place to take shelter in the rain or caffeinate in a hurry but hardly a meeting point to look forward to visiting.
It was the first and only experience I had with the space but it left a lasting impression. ‘I hope someone gives this spot a second chance,’ I thought to myself. When I returned earlier this year, I was overjoyed to see that it will flourish once again.
Perhaps the most incredible story I learned about the property, specifically with regard to the Grand Salon shown above and below in the recent photos, involves an 80-something Parisian woman who has lived each stage of the hotel’s existence firsthand. As a child, she joined her father at the Grand Salon where he would go regularly for business meetings. As he chatted and discussed important matters, she would sit rapt before the spirited commotion of lunching ladies, busy hommes d’affaires and hotel staff zipping between tables to keep everyone comfortable. It was grand, frenetic and exciting, full of life and activity, the kind that latches onto memory and remains a fixture of childhood. As she got older, the grand salon played host to her own adult conversations and served as the backdrop to many lunches where friendships were built and nurtured.
Today, she returns to the Grand Salon yet again to lunch weekly in the lofty, gilded epicenter of her own nostalgia. The furnishings may have been updated, the dust and tired columns revived, but the integrity and history of the place remains wonderfully in tact, eager and ready to be the frame for new memories.
Hilton Paris Opéra
108 rue Saint-Lazare
75008 Paris
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