Right Bank revival

"What have you done with the crystal perfume bottles?" asks an anxious guest as Grace Leo-Andrieu passes through the refurbished lobby of her new Paris hotel, the Lancaster. "Because if you don't want them, I'll buy them off you," he offers. Leo-Andrieu explains gently that the bottles are having silk shades fitted and will soon be returned to the Salon Berri, the intimate residents' lounge to the front of the reception.

The chandeliered opulence of the Lancaster is a world away from Leo-Andrieu's other Paris hotel, the Montalembert, which has been one of the seminal properties in the design hotel movement this decade.

The anxious regular has just highlighted one of the main hurdles Leo-Andrieu has had to overcome. The Lancaster belonged to the Savoy Group until April this year, and before that to the legendary Emile Wolf who opened it as a hotel in 1930.

In the past, clientele ranged from Noel Coward to John Huston, and many guests come back year after year. In its heyday the British made up 45% of guests, dwindling somewhat when the Savoy Group put the hotel on the market two years ago and let furnishings get rather shabby.

"The hotel had such a big reputation, especially in the UK market," explains Leo-Andrieu. "It has wonderful architecture, antiques and oil paintings, and a wonderful heritage. The Lancaster regulars would have been disappointed if I didn't give them that - so if I had done anything too radical I would have risked losing them. But then I didn't want a carbon copy of the original. So I had to use what we had, but give it a fresh spirit."

Leo-Andrieu closed the hotel for five months, opening on 25 August with its £2.5m refurbishment mostly - save a few bathrooms - in place.

The liveried doorman is still there, but the lobby, with its minimalist ebony high-backed bench from Christian Liaigre, gives a big hint of possible changes to come.

However, that is it for the modernist input, and any shattered nostalgia is restored immediately by the real log-burning fire in the fireplace to the left of the newly housed reception area, now out of sight of the main entrance. Leo-Andrieu clearly wants her guests to feel at home.

With the Montalembert, it was much easier for her to strip the property and start from scratch, so why go for a hotel like the Lancaster?

"You see, the Montalembert is for me very much a Left Bank hotel, designed and conceived for Left Bank clientele," she explains. "It was so obvious to me that there should be a Right Bank link to it. We had been looking for a Right Bank property with good architectural bones to work with, so when the Lancaster came along we went for it."

According to Leo-Andrieu, the Right Bank clientele are more traditional - they want 18th- and 19th-century furniture, chandeliers and oil paintings. About 1,000 pieces were inherited with the sale of the hotel. "How many hotels do you know that could boast a collection of paintings?" she asks. (Actually, there are about 100, of which 80 feature paintings by Boris Pastoukhoff who used them as currency in exchange for board in the 1930s.)

But how do you imbue all this tradition with a fresh spirit?

Worn furnishings were reupholstered to welcoming plumpness with contemporary copies of 18th- and 19th-century fabrics. Suppliers Braquenié and Pierre Frey produce a range that fit the bill.

The fabrics were applied by carefully chosen craftsmen, who also spent an age - at significant extra cost - giving the furniture's wood a patina. "I didn't want it to look spanking new; it would have taken away all the charm," Leo-Andrieu explains.

Chandeliers were taken down, cleaned, polished, rewired and refitted with a co-ordinating "cravate" twisting up to the high ceiling. "Adds a little bit of refinement, and it makes it less formal, don't you think?"

Harmonious

All the paintings were restored, "though initially I didn't like some of them, I thought they were so Forties. I also thought, will the guests like them with the new decoration?" So the paintings went back on the walls but according to the chosen colour scheme of the rooms. "Much more harmonious," she says.

There are 60 bedrooms in total, including 10 suites. Ranging from Ffr2,050 (£233) for a standard double to Ffr7,000 (£795) for the top suite, the bedrooms are all completely different. This in itself presented difficulties. Not one piece of furniture was standard, so Leo-Andrieu had to treat each room as a separate project - with a little help from an antique furnishings expert, just in case she made any cultural blunders.

Colour schemes are a departure from the luxury hotel norm. The Salon Berri mixes lavender with muted pistachio green; the Marlene Dietrich suite swims in caramel and mauve - the latter colour, and the hotel, were favourites of Dietrich. Chocolate brown makes regular appearances - on the plump sofas in the Grand Salon (the main lounge) and in the specially woven Braquenié carpets. "I've used a lot of brown, which I love, and people don't dare use it in hotels."

Bathrooms, one of Leo-Andrieu's hallmarks, are fitted out in large single slabs of white and grey Carrera marble, trimmed with an exotic-looking African wood called wenge, which she says is water-resistant. The twin marble sinks, set off by chrome fixtures from Leroy & Brooks, are carved into squat rectangles - which look great but are hell for housekeeping, admits front of house manager John Petch.

Comfort is Leo-Andrieu's buzzword. "Don't give me the 450g, give me the 650g," she says to her linen supplier, Porthault. Does this quality last longer? "Well, I don't know about that. It just feels so much better and that's what guests remember, and it's not so much more expensive at the end of the day."

The public are not allowed to eat in the café-bar: another one of Leo-Andrieu's foibles. "I think that in small luxury boutique hotels guests should be a priority."

Pampering

Is the café-bar viable? "Well, hotel restaurants are never viable, but it is there for us to pamper the guests." This pampering extends to guests being able to order any meal of their choice, provided they give the staff 24 hours' notice.

"I thought there was no point in doing a gastronomic restaurant here. First, we have only 30 covers; second, you just have to walk out of the door and there are a zillion restaurants around here; and anyway everybody wants to eat out in Paris, so what's the point in struggling?"

The short menu, which includes dishes such as langoustine and crab ravioli with wild mushrooms, is modelled on London restaurant Le Caprice. "People want something light after they have travelled, so we've reduced the fussiness of the whole thing." This is especially relevant now as many guests will be speeding through on Eurostar.

Attention to detail is another priority: "I'm obsessive about certain things." On flowers, she rules that bright blooms jar. "I keep telling the housekeeper to use one colour that goes with the room."

On service, she says: "You must have this feeling of service, but it must be discreet, in the background, not hovering over you as it was before. I hate pomp and pretension; if someone doesn't make you feel comfortable, then they don't belong there."

Leo-Andrieu redefines luxury. "In the last 10 years, people's expectations have changed a lot. People no longer expect gilded taps. They want things to function and clean up immaculately. And they want space. Space is luxury today. Plus, the fabrics I have used still cost as much as they did before, but they aren't flash."

The customer profile has shifted in the process. Leo-Andrieu wants to attract the "hip young things" as well as keep the over-65s. And if Paris Fashion Week this autumn was anything to go by - where the likes of Jasper Conran and his entourage blended happily with the silver-haired brigade - then she has got it right.