Coco Chanel’s Desk Was the Highest-Selling Item at the Ritz Paris’s Record-Breaking Furniture Auction

The Ritz Paris established a world record this month when its hotel-furniture auction earned $8,952,337—or the same amount as a seven-year vacation in one of its deluxe suites. The collaboration with the Paris-based auction house Artcurial featured 3,500 lots with 10,000 items from before the hotel’s $224 million refurbishment between 2012 and 2016.

Stéphane Aubert, one of the auctioneers, told Architectural Digest at Artcurial’s exhibition in Paris, “We have held sales for other hotels, the Crillon and the Plaza Athénée as well as the Hôtel de Paris in Monte-Carlo and the Trianon Palace in Versailles. But this one is different. The Ritz Paris is, certainly, the most famous hotel in the world, and we are selling a legend: the legend of the Ritz Paris.”

During the live auction of items from the Ritz Paris earlier this month.

Maximilien SPORSCHILL

The 43-hour auction exceeded the estimates (which had been at about $1 million) as it welcomed haute collectors from 54 countries. The United States was well represented in both items and those bidding on them, thanks to the historic connection between the Americans and the Ritz Paris—from the Goulds, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. (In the 1950s, the Ritz Paris was also featured in American films including An American in Paris with Gene Kelly and Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn.) “The auction attracted so many people and sometimes, indeed, famous names, like the Ritz Paris used to: actors, political figures, and artists,” Aubert said, hinting at some of the more high-profile bidders who participated in the event.

The desk and chair from the Coco Chanel suite.