Inside One of Paris’ Most Exclusive Hotels | Worlds Greatest Hotels S2 George V | Our Stories

Paris, famously known as the city of love. Its wealthiest visitors demand a hotel with five-star ooh-la-la and VIP va-va-voom. I would describe the Georges Cinq as a fairy tale palace. The minute you step through the revolving doors it's almost like, you know that scene in Superman where he goes in like an ordinary guy, and the next minute comes out the other end and he's Superman with this cape and this amazing outfit? That's how you feel. Welcome to the Four Seasons, Georges Cinq, as you arrive in this magnificent lobby. Look around you, this beautiful ceiling, beautiful tapestries. The hotel's 244 rooms range in price from £970 all the way up to a knee-trembling £22,000 a night. We're going to one of the most exclusive suites. You will see what we call it the penthouse suite. Please come in. In France, an exclusive group of 31 hotels that go above and beyond five stars have been classed as palace hotels. I've been on the tour around Buckingham Palace and I've been to the Georges Cinq, and they are remarkably similar, I must say. Spectacular views of the roof of Paris here, overlooking main monuments here, historic monuments in Paris. It's very popular with special occasion anniversaries, holy mooners. This incredible bathroom is all Onyx marble. A beautiful wall rug with plenty of space. We have opportunities to welcome many worldwide famous celebrities, politicians, President Ford has a chance to stay here, actors such as, you know, Gary Cooper, John Kelly, Rolling Stone, and just to name a few. This is the pool area. This is like a little oasis here in Paris. The right royal treatment starts long before one's privileged tootsies have even crossed the threshold. So I have here the cleaning a guest room procedure. So this procedure is 10 pages long. There's up to five people that pass in one room in order to make sure that it's perfect. So you have the housekeeper, you have the supervisor, you have the assistant manager, you have maybe the director of housekeeping. And if it's a big, important VIP for us, then perhaps I will pass as well to see just the last detail before the guest arrives. Assistant director of housekeeping, Cynthia Pichonnier, is a stickler for the standards training manual. So we are going to check a room, a suite, the Tour Eiffel suite for a new arrival. I see a little guest just here and to be sure it's very clean. No vase goes unturned. So I'm going on this side. So I'm just checking inside to be sure we don't have anything. We have a checklist and we have around, I think, 150 pounds in the room like that. And who needs a magnifying glass when you have eagle-eyed Cynthia? I have a little mark here, but I think it's painting. So I have to call the painter to remove it. There is an army of people here in the Josh Slank. I spend my life making sure that everything is perfect. There's a lot of preparation and a lot of work that goes into the eventual arrival of the guests. But in their bid for perfection, the local wildlife has a habit of raining on their parade. I will call the horseman because we have a lot of birds in Paris. And so we can see that we have to clean on this side. Whether staying in a B&B in Barnsley or a palace hotel in Paris, a good night's sleep is what it's all about. And the incoming guest of this £13,000 a night suite has paid for the right to be picky. Hello, Marichelle. Hi, Cynthia. How are you today? Good, thank you. Good? All right. Could we see together the bed? Because I have news, we have to change the bed. The luxury of a choice of pillows is so last year, when you can have a mattress menu. By default, we put a topper medium for the guests. And if the guests prefer a level of comfort softer or harder, we can change the topper. I believe actually that the guests expect this. You stay in a Parisian palace and you have to have something en plus, right? You pay the highest rate in the city. You better have the most special little something that makes the difference. And should the desire strike to eat a national monument, then the staff are happy to oblige. With painters dispatched and housemen summoned, Cynthia's work is done. Coming up, a wine lover's paradise. We have 50,000 bottles. And a pricey tea total option. The hot chocolate comes in at a cool 28 euros. 28 euros, you heard it here. In Paris, if the richest rich and the fussiest famous aren't satisfied with a mere five-star luxury, they can go one step further and check into a palace. It's the highest possible hotel rating in France. And the historic George V takes its exclusive ranking very seriously. People come to us because we don't say no. Of course, unless it's something highly inappropriate that we can't do, then we will find a nice way to say no. The 244-room hotel has been pampering the world's elite since 1928. One of my favourite rooms at the hotel is La Galerie. It's a sumptuous room filled with 19th-century Flemish tapestries on the wall. It has clocks which were brought from the Versailles Palace and now reside in the gallery, which is one of the most decadent and opulent rooms I think I've ever been in. It has come to embody the idea of the great Parisian palace hotel. And for wealthy Francophiles, this is a hotel seemingly French through and through, all the way down to its very foundations. You are riding 60 steps under the hotel. Because this is where, behind armoured steel doors, they keep a commodity that is, to the French, more precious than gold bullion. You are arriving for the Temple of the Wine. Eric Beaumar heads up the team looking after the hotel's wine cellar. Now we are arriving in the cellar, the door of the cellar of Georges V, La Cave. How many people are allowed to come here? Not a lot, just a sommelier. Eric has managed to create one of the, certainly, finest selection of wines in the world. You know, we have 50,000 bottles. In Eric's domain, don't expect to find any vin ordinaire. Here it's go extraordinaire or go home. Mostly wine in Georges V is Burgundy, because I love the Burgundy too. Sometimes we have some wine you can't buy. Like that. There, we have 10,000 people who want to buy that. But they can't, because the world wants this wine. Why? Because the estate is so, so, so famous. I have a lot in Georges V. Fortunately, the hotel has the perfect setting for this valuable hoard. The hotel's foundations were built on the site of an old quarry. The site had been used previously for quarrying good stone from big buildings in Paris, like the Trocadéro and the Arc de Triomphe. The rock once used to build grandiose landmarks now protects the equally grandiose wine. That is specific to the rocks of Paris. It's a chalk, white chalk. But it's good because it keeps the freshness and the regulation of the humidity. If you buy the wine, it's a good seller to Egypt. That's so important. Especially important when you're stocking one of the most expensive wines in the world. I have a lot of Petrus. I have perhaps 120 bottles. It will be perfect in 20 years. The problem is 20 years. In a restaurant, it's between 5,000 and 15,000. But that is a very expensive wine. Eric has fond memories of a particular guest who appreciated his priciest of plonks. And during four years, he drank like 300 bottles of Petrus in a hotel in the restaurant. That's a few million pounds worth of wine. And if you're a true VVVIP and would like to bring a bottle, Eric offers some exclusive real estate in his underground lair. That is a private box for my friend guest, for the private seller. Some guests stay every year in Georges V. Sometimes they ask me if they can store a few wines they bought in Paris, of course. And I think it's a specific service. Eric's wine list offers a glug of history with a 1792 Madeira made the year before Marie Antoinette was beheaded, just down the road from where the hotel now stands. But that's not the most expensive option. The expensive wine is perhaps more younger. It's younger, it's younger. Like the Petrus 61, magnum of Petrus 61 is between 15 and 30,000 euro, the bottle. Serious. But for any penny-pinching guest who thinks they can save a fortune by staying t-total, they might want to think again. Even having a sweet tooth in one of Paris's most luxurious hotels could put a strain on the offshore bank account. One of the specialities on the menu is the hot chocolate, which comes in at a cool 28 euros. 28 euros, you heard it here. So first, we're going to make the marshmallow with what is the topping for the hot chocolate. The accompanying orange blossom marshmallow is made from scratch every day. The chocolate is specially sourced tolucolum dark chocolate from Belize. There's a homemade vanilla chantilly, which is made with vanilla which has been sourced from Tahiti. And the drink is served in a traditional ceramic chocolatera. The hotel sells 49,000 pounds worth of these a year. The worship of wine and chocolat are just two of the reasons this hotel has a reputation as the epitome of La Belle France. And yet, surprisingly, this bastion of Frenchness was the brainchild of an American. The Georges Sank was a hotel built for the huge cost of 60 million francs by an American called Joe Hillman. And he had a very simple ambition, which was to create the best hotel he could on one of the best streets in Paris. On the 25th of May, 1928, this 300-bedroom Art Deco hotel opened to a captive audience. After the First World War, Paris took off in the American imagination. They held this fond image of a city which danced all night, a city where the food was great. With 40,000 Americans flooding the city, Hillman was hoping they'd choose his hotel in which to rest their heads. The idea behind the Georges Sank was that there was no difference between your transatlantic liner and the luxury of that kind of travel and your final destination. It became an icon overnight. People were tremendously impressed. It was this brash, big, white edifice with very crisp and almost aggressive lines that was uncommon at the time. The hotel was built on a road recently renamed Avenue Georges Sank to honour the British king's help in World War I, and the hotel's name followed suit. It's interesting that it's a hotel financed by an American, built in France and named after a British king. So it has this oddly cosmopolitan sort of identity from the get-go. Hillman had grand aspirations for his regal grand dame. Georges Sank was a very expensive hotel. It had his and hers bathrooms so that you could both get ready at the same time. It was a real place to dress up, a real place to be seen. The hotel was aiming high, and at the dawn of commercial flight, its idea of luxury took off. They actually introduced an air taxi. It was a private plane that would shuttle you between London and Paris, or Berlin and Paris. Nobody else was doing anything like that. It was very confident that it was going to be the fashionable centre, not just of Paris, not just of France, but of Europe. It's a level of luxury and service that remains the ambition today. France might be a republic, but once inside this hotel, the customer is king. It's about knowing your guests, anticipating everything they might want and need. If you are in the courtyard, just having like a casual coffee or something, and then the sun comes out, and this happened to me, where I was thinking, oh, I wish I'd brought my sunglasses down. Two seconds later, they appear with a box of 12 sunglasses, so that you can choose the pair that you would most like to wear while you're sitting there. And they were all like designer sunglasses. But in the 1940s, the hotel's very existence came under threat, as World War II loomed. Paris fell virtually undamaged to the German army, and they moved in, as said in Casablanca, they took all the best places. And one of the places that they used was the Georges Cinq. But not before the hotel had protected one of its most treasured assets. The Georges Cinq's wine cellar was hidden during the Second World War, when they knew there were enemy troops in the offing, went down to the wine cellar, moved all the expensive bottles to one end, and created a new brick wall, beyond which the wine could not be raided. After the fall of Paris in June 1940, four years of German occupation followed. And here, interestingly, one of the hotel's most unusual stories unfolded, which was the round table that used to meet of German and French intellectuals, writers and artists, actually in the hotel. Most famously, the French poet and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau, and German writer, Ernst Jünger. So you had these men who should have been enemies, but were coming to some kind of accommodation. It was a hotel which had a reputation for quality, and these were Germans and French people who enjoyed nice things to eat and drink, while discussing the great issues of the day. In 1944, there were several plots to remove Hitler. One of them involved blowing him up with a bomb, and the other one involved replacing him with Rommel. At least two of the German officers that frequented the hotel were subsequently implicated. It does give a certain feast when you think, well, was the plot against Hitler discussed and the George sank? Certainly some of the key players were there. Historic events tend to happen in great hotels, because, of course, extraordinary people go there, extraordinary things happen. Coming up, the megastars come to town. The Beatles represented innocence, and the Stones brought decadence to the George sank. And food gets the star treatment. It's the only hotel in Europe to have five Michelin stars across three restaurants. When the Jetsets come to Paris, they can depend on one of the city's most historic hotels to cater for their every superstar whim. The George sank has a very A-list guest list. George Clooney, Gwyneth Paltrow, the Kardashians. The minute you walk through the doors, you just feel it. You feel that, you know, this place has got a history, and there's something about it. More often than not, it's the concierge who is first in the firing line to satisfy the demands of the kind of guests who aren't used to hearing the word non. First of all, we use the telephone. And not only once, sometimes. Two telephone, and we have the guests in front of our desk sometimes. Every guest may need a reservation to go to a restaurant, a theatre, an opera, a private cruise on the Seine. It could be a day in Champagne or in Normandy. It could be a bistro of three Michelin star restaurants. I order flowers, I'm babysitting. You need to be able to adapt yourself quickly to a new situation. That's something that has to be automatic. In January of 1964, the staff had to adapt very quickly when four lads from Liverpool checked in. They were fast on the way to becoming the most famous people in the world. The Beatles were already huge in England. They had two first number one albums. They had four or five singles and two EPs. All were smash hits. The Fab Four were in Paris to perform at the world-famous Olympia. They played 41 concerts in three weeks. Most of the time, it was two concerts a day. One day, they even played three concerts. Please follow me. The two adjoining suites the Beatles stayed in played host to the stuff of legend. Royal Suite 124 has since been redecorated. It would set you back a cool £21,000 to be able to soak up the room's history. That was the beginning of the Beatles mania. That's the beginning. And the French people were crazy about them. The setup was made with a piano in the suite so they could walk on daily basis. And Paul had dreamed a tune in 63. That song was Yesterday. And he worked on Yesterday in January 1964 in Paris. But that wasn't the only hit that John and Paul magicked up in this very room. There is a kind of lovely irony that the Beatles wrote Can't Buy Me Love in the Royal Suite at the Georges Saint since they must have been mindful that money could buy them plenty of other things under the circumstances. Still, it's a lovely sentiment and delightful to think that those impish little mop tops were cavorting around in what is today Not only that, but cavorting with female company too. Accessible to only the hotel's poshest pads is a hidden roof garden. But all that songwriting and posing for photos was hard work. And a rock star still got to eat. They had a special room service for them. And George, at one point, he said, Oh, I'd rather have an egg sandwich instead of caviar. And someone in England heard it from the London Egg Board or something like that. And they delivered a special sandwich eggs for George. They put it on the plane. It was delivered here at the hotel. Paul discovered Crêpe Suzette. He loved them. And John wanted milk on everything. Whatever their dietary requirements, the Beatles paved the way for the other rock legends of the era. There's an interesting moment in the 70s when the Stones stopped being the bad boys of rock and got a taste for luxury. The Beatles represented innocence, and the Stones brought decadence to the George Sang. Rock stars in the 1970s became the new aristocracy. The Kashifa Hotel is always improved if you have a famous name staying there. But I tend to look at the other way around, that the reason why the famous name is staying there is because it's a good hotel. When you're also attracting Hollywood royalty and the air of a hotel competitor, you know you're doing something right. Elizabeth Taylor and her, I think, second husband, Conrad Hilton, honeymooned in the presidential suite. You know, he's Conrad Hilton, and he's staying there. That was quite the coup. Well, he was actually her first husband, but who's counting? Can be hard to keep track with these A-listers. Gwyneth Paltrow, honeymooned there with her current husband, Brad Falchuk. It will always be on the celebrity's top list of places, because it does have this incredible history. Posh celebs also love their posh nosh. When it comes to the French, it's a never-ending pursuit for the coveted Michelin star. You're no kind of palace hotel unless you've got a very good restaurant. I think the competition is very stiff. Christiane Lescaire, executive chef at the hotel's flagship restaurant Le Cinq, has won no less than three. I mean, three Michelin stars is like they've gone to the Himalayas and got baby's tears and brought it back to just sort of poach the eggs in. And gourmet guests will need to fork out £330 per person for the tasting menu. It's incredibly expensive. You can pay £95 for a starter. While most hotels would be over the moon with a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, this hotel hasn't stopped there. We have another restaurant called L'Orangerie, which is also a one-star Michelin restaurant. And Le Georges has won. It's more relaxed and it's Mediterranean cuisine. And for the maths whizzes amongst you, that's a total of five. It's the only hotel in Europe to have five Michelin stars across three restaurants. You know, that in itself is a huge accolade for the hotel to have. In Le Georges, the kitchen is headed up by Italian chef Simone Zanoni. So if foie gras isn't your thing, how about some posh pasta? People tend to associate pasta with like a trattoria or a basic food or dish. And obviously, so we find a way to make a Michelin star, to turn it into something more refined, more delicate. Simply, we take this beautiful filling. So this filling basically is made with braised veal and mushrooms. Here, they try to cater to all tastes, to please all guests, as long as you like Michelin stars. What makes our hotel very different from the rest of it is that we got three different identities. Guests don't want to eat a free Michelin star every day. We are more easygoing and the experience is slightly easier. Easygoing maybe, but it's still 34 of your hard-earned pounds for this bowl of pasta. So this is really like labour-intense preparation, because just for one person, you need to have like six tortelli. So it takes really a long time. And 400 of these are flying off the pass each month. 60% of our guests are regulars. So these tortelli, I can't take them off the menu, because people do come back to eat them. The way the mushroom are colouring. Oh, they're so tasty. A bit of Michelin star zhuzhing and voila. So we have a braised veal tortelli with truffle parmigiano and veal juice. Buon appetito a tutti. So Italian food in a French hotel built by an American. But it's Saudi royalty that has spearheaded the hotel's most recent revolution. In 1996, Al-Waleed bin Talal bought the hotel for an astonishing $185 million. Prince Al-Waleed, one of the richest businessmen in the world, is often referred to as the Warren Buffett of Saudi Arabia. He'd spent time at the hotel as a child and had grand plans to resurrect this grand dame. He wanted to really sustain the hotel and replenish it to its original glory. Pierre Yves Rochon was a French interior designer who had luxury hotels queuing for his services. Well, Pierre Yves Rochon is a very grand fromage in that sphere, and I think a kind of genius. Of course, I was very proud and I said, I hope I can do it. I fight to keep for His Highness the spirit of the George V. And this was to be no mere facelift. It's a little bit like Madonna in that it keeps reinventing itself over and over again. Coming up, a hay fever sufferer's nightmare. How are you going to be different by having just the most absurd number of flowers? And the hotel's new owner goes on a spending spree. And what can you do with $120 million, right? So they just went to town. In 1928, a pleasure palace was built in the right place at the right time to cater to a mass of rich Americans. And there's two types of Americans in Paris in the 20s and 30s. There's the left bank bohemian writer crowd with Hemingway and all of that kind of, you know, Scott Fitzgerald. And then there's the multimillionaires who come across in the transatlantic lioners. This place, the Georges Sank, is at the centre of what the right bank is about, which is power, money, sex and politics. But as the hotel approached the ripe old age of 70, it was looking tired. And in the late 1990s, new owner Prince Al-Waleed was embarking on a huge renovation in a bid to restore its je ne sais quoi. We purchased it for $185 million and then went on to spend a further $120 million on a refurb. And it took two years. So it was an incredible transformation. And what can you do with $120 million, right? So they just went to town. He accepted to redo completely from scratch. So air conditioning, plumbing, everything was not working properly on the old Georges Sank. And we completely redesigned the layout of the rooms. And then he put the Four Seasons in charge of running it for him. And that has perhaps helped push the Georges Sank back into that status of superstar hotel. The mammoth job took over 1,100 artisans and workmen to take the hotel back to its bare skeleton, reducing the 300 rooms to 244. When I arrived, it was not anymore the beautiful Georges Sank from the beginning, the 30s. The restaurant Le Sank was a meeting room, terrible meeting room. Low ceiling, no life. We tried to design a new Georges Sank between the classical and the 30s as we can. But Pierre Yves salvaged what he could along the way. We have four beautiful tapestries. Of course, we kept all these tapestries. One is in the entrance. It's for the 18th century. It's an original one. And one is behind the concierge. It's just sort of grand European. Of course, there's lots of marble. There's lots of massive chandeliers. But the style in the rooms, they kept it quite elegant, French, lots of Louis furniture. Downstairs is more modern, but upstairs, the rooms are very traditional. I completely redesigned the lobby. And we designed a beautiful floor with six type of marble, shade of the beige, gray, yellow, and blue. This type of floor is very expensive. It was done in Italy by two people, the father and the son. And I think that's a beautiful room. The hotel reopened its doors on the 18th of December, 1999. Everyone was really keen to see how it changed and what there was new to it. And it became kind of stratospheric in just reaching everyone's ideas of what a top hotel should be. And that's how it is now. When you walk in the door, I've got the feeling that I'm walking into a film set. This is where James Bond would come and have his vodka martinis. The more time you spend there, you realize it's got a sort of multiple personality disorder in the best possible way. Different parts of the hotel have very different characters, and individual rooms can feel very different as well. So it's a great hotel to explore over time. The hotel also has a blooming good trick up its sleeve to attract Paris's most chic tourists. Last time I counted, there were getting on for 2,000 hotels in Paris. So how are you going to be different? By having just the most absurd number of flowers. For the last 21 years, the man in charge of the Nine Strong floristry team has been American art director Jeff Latham. He's a florist to Oprah Winfrey and Avril Lavigne, and these flowers kind of represent another world. That is a kind of post-modern style to the rest of the hotel. With his ample budget, Jeff has helped create the hotel's identity. They spend a huge amount on flowers. I think it's a million pounds a year just on flowers. It sort of is saying we just go so much further than any other hotel. We are the creme de la creme. It sort of symbolizes how much effort they put into everything they do. All the other hotels that up and took notice, they really did. What Jeff did with those floral displays kind of put Georges Blanc on the map. You will take a photograph of these installations. They are amazing. And they're sort of Instagram catnip. Sometimes when guests entrance in the lobby, he sees a flower and when you do checking in the reception, he asks for exactly the same flower in the room. And you can do it? Yes, all the time. You need to say yes. Can you change all the dark faleno? Because she don't look nice and missing some flower. You have a delivery of 11,000 flowers each week. Not something you'd get from your average florist. So here they go shopping in the Netherlands at the biggest flower market in the world. I buy the flower in Alsemae and that's come three times each week. Classic type of flower. You have some hydrangea. You have some calla lilies. When it comes to events and weddings, the team always tries to rise to the challenge. But despite the scale of these displays, this team of florists are all about the personal touches. You have 244 rooms and each room have one bouquet. Because you have many regular clients and guests and you know each gets the flower he like and make sure when you arrive, you have the flower he like in the room. That's the goals of the team. And these particular flowers are destined for a guest who has a penchant for white roses. It's now almost a hundred years since this cosmopolitan palace hotel started catering to the extravagances of its clientele. I would say, of course, it is the greatest hotel in the world. But if we're being a bit more modest, of course, one of the greatest hotels in the world. And we were certainly very proud of this recognition. In a city that is so full of glamour, romance and style, it still manages to stand out from the crowd. The Georges Saint is one of those great hotels which has no obvious equal. It is so good at being French. For me, it's like a princess's castle. It's really a jewel of a hotel.