You arrive on the top floor and the corridor simply ends. There is no other door. The suite opens across the whole of it — a run of rooms that unfolds rather than announces itself, where the light travels from one end to the other over the course of a day and never quite repeats itself.

Mornings are wide and bright. By late afternoon the rooms have gone gold, and by evening the lamps do the work the windows did — low, warm, close. It is less a suite than a private floor of the hotel, and for as long as you stay, no one else sets foot on it.

Arrival is handled a little differently here. You are met at the door like every other guest and taken up, but the key is handed over at the top of the house rather than at the bottom, and whatever you asked for beforehand — flowers kept out of the bedroom, the fire lit or left, a table held at Marée — has already been done.

Guests who take it tend to fall into one of two habits. Some use it as a base and are out by nine, back by dusk, with the city in between. Others hardly leave it: breakfast on the terrace, lunch by the fire, and only the evening spent downstairs. The suite is arranged for either, and does not mind which.