“Our ambition is to create the finest urban hotel in the world,” says Éric Fratty, Design and Construction Director at Maisons Cheval Blanc (MCB), the exclusive LVMH-owned hotel company, which was founded by LVMH Chairman and Chief Executive Bernard Arnault himself, in 2006. Fratty was speaking a day before the opening of MCB’s fifth address, their first in Paris, located in part of the mythic La Samaritaine department store, which the LVMH group has just spent $900 million redeveloping (for a review of the retail revamp, click here). Since it enjoys by far the best views, the riverside wing of the store was set aside for the hotel, a part of the complex completed in 1928 by architects Frantz Jourdain and Henri Sauvage, who dressed up their steel-framed structure in monumental Art Deco façades. Following a competition, in 2010, MCB appointed French architect Édouard François to undertake the conversion and New Yorker Peter Marino to oversee the interior design.