Ritz hotel in France has auctioned off its luxury furniture for €7.3 million making the world record in hotel industry.
The hotel was the home for a while to writers like Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust and fashion legend Coco Chanel. The hotel authorities sold off all 10,000 pieces of furniture and decor.
They included stools from the Hemingway Bar, a 19th-century bathtub and sofas and a harp from the Proust Lounge.
The Ritz Hotel sale outperformed those of other hotels around the world, the auction house said. In 2013 in Paris, Hotel de Crillon made €5.9 million from a furniture sale, while Plaza Athenee made €1.4 million.
In the Ritz auction, 3,400 lots were up for grabs between Monday and Friday last week.
The buyers bid for objects ranging from velvet security cordons and curtain ties to rugs, bed frames and sets of bathrobes and slippers embroidered with the Ritz insignia.
The price estimates ran from €100 for a pair of tablecloths to €10,000 for a pair of nymph sculptures carrying bronze candelabras that used to decorate the lobby.
The hotel decided to sell the pieces from its famous Place Vendome address when it reopened in June 2016 after four years of extensive renovations. Owned by Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed since 1979, the Ritz Hotel had accumulated all the impressive quantities of objects since it was opened in 1898 by Cesar Ritz.
It has served as the backdrop to several key moments in history. The Nazis requisitioned it during World War II, but had cleared out by the time Hemingway burst in with a group of Resistance fighters on Aug 25, 1944, gun in hand, to “personally liberate” it.
