Hôtel Costes Review: Jacques Garcia's Paris Icon

2025-10-15 · By April Windsor

There are hotels that seduce you on arrival, and there are hotels that have been seducing the city around them for decades. Hôtel Costes is the latter — a place so steeped in its own atmosphere that stepping through the door on Rue Saint-Honoré feels less like checking in and more like entering a film someone forgot to stop shooting. Jacques Garcia's interiors have not aged so much as deepened: red velvet, low light, Napoleon III opulence filtered through a lens that is unmistakably, defiantly Parisian.

THE RESTAURANT & BAR

The courtyard is where Paris comes to be seen without admitting it. Sheltered beneath the building's Italianate façade, it operates as an open-air salon — tables close enough for intrigue, far enough apart for discretion. In the warmer months, the space fills with a particular kind of energy: fashion editors between shows, gallerists after openings, couples who look as though they've been cast for the occasion. The menu is brasserie-refined — think steak tartare prepared tableside, lobster salad with citrus dressing, and a wine list that leans unapologetically French. Service is precise without being stiff, and the kitchen understands that at Costes, a meal is never just a meal. It is part of the performance. The people-watching, meanwhile, is unrivalled. Downstairs, past the lobby and through a corridor that narrows like a secret, the bar is everything a Parisian hotel bar should be and very little else. It is small and deliberately so. The lighting hovers somewhere between candlelit and conspiratorial. The cocktails are strong, the music is the soundtrack everyone else has been trying to replicate for twenty years, and the room has the rare quality of making you feel like you've arrived — not at a destination, but at exactly the right moment.

THE ROOMS

Each room is its own darkened theatre. Heavy drapes frame windows that overlook the courtyard or the rooftops of the 1st arrondissement. The palette is burgundy, gold, and shadow — sumptuous without being precious, layered with antique mirrors, brocade cushions, and the kind of moody half-light that makes every hour feel like midnight. The bathrooms are clad in Italian marble, deep soaking tubs positioned beneath gilded fixtures, with robes heavy enough to feel like a statement. The beds are the sort you sink into and briefly consider never leaving. There is no minimalism here, no Scandinavian restraint. Costes commits fully to the fantasy, and it works. What Garcia understood when he dressed these rooms is that comfort and theatre are not opposites — that a guest wrapped in velvet and surrounded by oil paintings sleeps no worse for the drama. Every suite tells its own story: some face inward to the courtyard, others look out across the zinc rooftops of the 1st, and a few sit high enough to catch the late afternoon light as it turns the city gold. The turndown service is quiet, the details are impeccable, and the rooms have that rare quality of feeling both indulgent and entirely private.

THE WORLD OF COSTES

Few hotels have built a universe as coherent as this one. The Costes shop is less a gift counter and more a lifestyle manifesto — signature candles in burnished gold, silk pyjama collaborations with Olivia von Halle, eau de toilettes that smell like the lobby at midnight, and a library of vinyl pressings from their legendary compilation series. There are house-made chocolates and sauces, because of course there are. It is maximalist, unapologetic, and entirely its own thing. What Costes understands, perhaps better than any hotel in Paris, is that atmosphere is not decoration. It is conviction.

PhotographyAll photography by Splendid Magazine, captured on the Leica M Series and Apple iPhone 17 Pro.

Splendid's book of cinematic hotels, Hotel Diaries, is available in print and digital editions.