Storied Paris Ritz reopens after four-year US$450 million refit

The Paris Ritz is finally back in business. On Monday, the storied hotel on Paris’s Place Vendome, the elegant, 18th-century square that now features the world’s most exclusive jewellery vendors, officially opened its doors after a four-year, US$450 million renovation.

With an original budget of about US$160 million, the Ritz, established in 1898, has long been a synonym for decadent excess. For one, room rates start at US$1,475 per night.

“When in Paris,” once observed the writer Ernest Hemingway, “the only reason not to stay at the Ritz is if you can’t afford it.”

The hotel’s most famous bar is named for Hemingway, who is a crucial figure in the mythology of this most mythologised of hotels.

On August 25, 1944, legend has “Papa” rolling into the Place Vendome, determined to liberate his beloved Ritz from the Germans, who’d used the hotel as the headquarters of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force, during World War II.

The Germans were already gone by then, but Hemingway, then a war correspondent for Collier’s magazine, stormed inside regardless, running up a bar tab that, by one account, apparently included 51 dry gin martinis by the end of the night. Presumably his compatriots shared at least a few.