Where: the newly-refurbished grand fromage on the Left Bank

What: five-star cosmopolitan luxe

Good for: those who want a little histoire with their luxe

The Lutetia opened on a cold Paris afternoon on 28 December 1910, and it’s been hot ever since. Mr Pablo Picasso moved in. Mr James Joyce and Mr Albert Camus merely stayed regularly. President de Gaulle took a honeymoon suite at the same time Mr Henri Matisse was living there. And naturally, this being the Left Bank, author Mr Andre Gide ate his lunch there every day in the 1920s. The Lutetia is a hotel with heft, artistic bottom – clout. And that was just the first few decades. Later, while in the hands of the Taittinger champagne family, it was all Mr Brad Pitt, Mr David Lynch and the French goddess Ms Catherine Deneuve. Now it sizzles again, having emerged from a four-year chrysalis of a £177m refurbishment.

The Lutetia is in Saint-Germain-des-Pris on the Left Bank, a couple of miles from Paris’ “golden triangle” of “palace” hotels, which is a good thing because, Saint-German-des-Pris feels like a real place, rather than a shiny jewellery box. Locals come for lunch; there are real boulangeries on the corner, rather than international patisserie chains pretending to be corner boulangeries. You can get a coffee without queuing with your fellow tourists. The hotel was built by the Boucicaut family who founded Paris’ first department store, Le Bon Marche, in 1852, and wanted a place to put up customers close to the shop. Today the majority of shops surrounding the hotel (boulangeries aside) sell beautiful furniture and the like.

The Lutetia’s style is modern Parisian done with imperial expense. The original architects Messrs Henri Tauzin and Louis-Hippolyte Boileau created it in the image of Art Nouveau and the architect of its facelift, Mr Jean-Michele Wilmotte, has been sensitive to that vision. The previously dark spaces have been made light – a 1920s mosaic was unearthed in the lobby, there is now a winter garden with a stained-glass roof, as if a window had got uppity and got ahead of itself and headed for the ceiling, it is playful, jolly, wholly unintimidated. The staff are decked out in tasteful shades of grey. And in a new addition, if you head 180-degrees down you find heaven: a 700sq m spa with Hollywood lighting and a pool long enough (17m) to work up a sweat in.

There is a gastronomique restaurant which wasn’t open when MR PORTER visited but the relaxed brasserie next door was, knocking out quality steak tartare and all the other Gallic greats. The main action seems to be in the bar, though. It is equipped with a piano and player and it reverberates to the sounds of Parisians sipping champagne. The fact that it attracts locals is a very good thing and one hopes they continue to come for their Martinez cocktails and olives.

The hotel’s tall pale stone exterior looms out as if a recent émigré from the white cliffs of Dover. The guest rooms are high-modernist, chic: enormous beds, white marble bathrooms, dark blues, shiny bronze and with double windows onto Juliette balconies. What is particularly unusual for Paris, though, is all the rooms, from cheapest to dearest, are big, chiefly because after the refurb, the number of chambres has gone from 234 to 184. The hotel group from whence it has sprung also owns the Café Royal in London and the Conservatorium in Amsterdam – each quite different but united in one single way: they take what you think is luxurious and then make it the more so.