Inside Hôtel de Berri, The Paris Hotel Where Elsa Schiaparelli’s Spirit Still Runs The Table

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

Paris has no shortage of hotels with history. Hôtel de Berri has something more interesting: a former resident with enough personality to haunt the place — in the best possible way. At 22 rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, the five-star Luxury Collection hotel occupies an address once synonymous with Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian-born couturière whose surrealist imagination helped rewrite the rules of 20th-century fashion. Schiaparelli moved here in 1937, taking over an 18-room residence and its garden at the height of her career, and remained associated with the address for nearly 40 years, until close to her death in 1973. Her home became a gathering place for the artists, writers and provocateurs — Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray among them — who populated her world.

She wasn’t even the address’s first notable resident. In 1871, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte — daughter of Jérôme Bonaparte, a cousin and former fiancée of Napoleon III, and later the wife of Count Anatole Demidoff — lived at 22 rue de Berri and filled it with artists, writers and aristocrats of her own. Today, that layered history provides the backbone for one of Paris’s more characterful five-star stays.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

A Parisian Home With A Fashion Pedigree

Between 1975 and 1978, the mansions at 18, 20 and 22 rue de Berri, Schiaparelli’s home among them, were demolished and replaced with a vast office building designed by architect and urban planner Maurice Novarina, a Grand Prix de Rome winner whose career spanned 1933 to 1995. Decades later, the Dokhan family — Parisian hoteliers Stéphane and Pascal Dokhan, who also own Le Métropolitan and Le Dokhan’s — acquired the building and opened Hôtel de Berri in December 2018, fully preserving Novarina’s 54-meter façade, which remains the only Novarina exterior on any Paris hotel.

Part of The Luxury Collection, Hôtel de Berri is decidedly not interested in the restrained beige minimalism that has come to define so much contemporary luxury. Designer and set decorator Philippe Renaud instead conceived the interiors as an exuberant homage to 20th-century French decorative arts, layering marble, gilding, mirrors, antique furniture, saturated color and references to some of Paris’s greatest tastemakers. It feels appropriately theatrical for a hotel sitting on Schiaparelli’s former turf.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

The property’s 75 accommodations include 35 suites across six categories — Deluxe, Junior Suites, Signature Suites, Prestige Suites, Berri Suites and the Parisian Suite — with interiors referencing everyone from Giacometti and Jean-Michel Frank to Madeleine Castaing, Henri Samuel, David Hicks and, inevitably, Schiaparelli herself. The largest, the neo-Classical Parisian Suite, subtly recalls the grandeur of the designer’s former residence, while the four 100-square-meter Berri Suites contain their own nods to the personalities who once inhabited the address. Modern comforts run underneath the period references: Apple TV and Netflix access, Focal speakers, Skinjay aromatherapy and Diptyque amenities in marble bathrooms with heated floors, and, for the fitness-averse, an “in your suite” service that will install a rowing machine or treadmill directly in the room on request.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

Yet perhaps the hotel’s greatest luxury is outside. Hidden behind the building is a sprawling 3,000-square-meter landscaped garden — a rarity in this part of Paris and a surviving link to the property’s earlier life. The garden opens from the hotel’s cocktail bar, Le Bizazz, and creates the peculiar sensation of being somewhere far removed from the Champs-Élysées, despite being only minutes away. A spa with Carita treatment rooms and two steam rooms rounds out the property.

That tension runs throughout Hôtel de Berri: grand but playful, historical without feeling like a museum, and thoroughly Parisian without relying on the usual clichés.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

Le Schiap Begins A New Chapter

The most compelling reason to rediscover Hôtel de Berri now, however, may be downstairs.

In September 2026, the hotel’s signature restaurant, Le Schiap, entered a new era under chef Stéphane Pitré, whose career has included The Ritz London, Lucas Carton under Jérôme Banctel, and his own Michelin-starred Paris restaurant LOUIS. Pitré’s path back to the Dokhan family has a nice symmetry to it: his first executive chef role, in 2011, was at the Dokhans’ own Métropolitan Hotel. He went on to earn his first Michelin star at LOUIS in 2019, retained it through 2024, and sold the restaurant in December 2025 after a decade in business — clearing the way, as it turned out, for this new chapter. At Le Schiap, his cooking is deliberately less about culinary theatrics than pristine ingredients, seasonality and relationships with French producers.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

The irony, of course, is that he is cooking in a space inspired by one of fashion’s greatest theatrical minds. That contradiction works beautifully.

The menu reads as a tour through French terroir: heirloom tomatoes from producer Catherine Huitric become a colorful carpaccio; line-caught Normandy sea bass, sourced through fisherman Fabien Tesson, arrives with shellfish nage and grilled seasonal vegetables; Paimpol coco beans are paired with haddock and wild mushrooms; Challans duck comes with Solliès figs; girolle mushrooms accompany French veal; and desserts range from a Bourdaloue-style quetsch plum tart with hay-infused vanilla ice cream to a chaud-froid made with Guanaja 70% Grand Cru chocolate.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri

When Fashion Inspires Cuisine

But Pitré hasn’t ignored the woman whose presence defines the address.

His Lobster Dress is an edible homage to Schiaparelli’s legendary 1937 collaboration with Salvador Dalí — a monumental lobster painted on an ivory silk gown that became one of the defining symbols of surrealist fashion — transforming the motif into lobster ravioli with tetragon shoots and ginger-infused lobster-head jus. The Schiaparelli Bag, meanwhile, turns the designer’s surrealist 1930s accessories into a trompe-l’oeil dessert of rhubarb, rose water, seasonal fruit and yogurt ice cream. Even Elsa’s Granita has personality, bringing together Sicilian lemon, yuzu, Junmai Ginjo sake, coffee and nutmeg.

It’s fashion history without the reverence becoming too precious.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri/David Atlan

Where Art, Fashion And Paris Collide

The restaurant’s visual centerpiece drives the point home. Artist Hippolyte Romain created a monumental fantasy fresco imagining Woody Allen directing a film about Schiaparelli, populated by a gloriously impossible cast of Parisian cultural figures.

Dalí mingles with Jean Cocteau; Gertrude Stein encounters Diana Vreeland; Coco Chanel makes an appearance, as do Hubert de Givenchy, Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Eras collapse into one another, transforming the dining room into the kind of fantastical salon Schiaparelli herself might have appreciated.

Photo Credit: Hôtel de Berri/David Atlan

Le Schiap is open Monday through Friday, from noon to 2 p.m. and 7 to 9:30 p.m., with starters from €18, main courses from €28 and desserts from €12; the lunch menu runs €28 for a main course alone, €36 for two courses or €42 for three. Reservations can be made by phone, email or through SevenRooms.

And that may be Hôtel de Berri’s greatest strength. Parisian luxury is often defined by perfection — immaculate symmetry, hushed rooms, polished marble and impeccable service. Hôtel de Berri allows itself to be stranger than that. Its references are layered. Its colors are unapologetic. Its interiors occasionally flirt with excess. Behind the hotel’s protected 54-meter façade is a world conceived around wit, art, fashion and the particular sort of cultivated irreverence that Schiaparelli made her signature.

Nearly 90 years after she first made 22 rue de Berri her home, Elsa Schiaparelli is no longer here.

But Paris being Paris, she hasn’t entirely left either.

Hôtel de Berri is located at 18-22 Rue de Berri, 75008 Paris, France

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