It has hosted everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Madonna, Ernest Hemingway to Audrey Hebpburn—and is where Princess Diana spent her final evening in 1997.

Now Paris’s fabled Hôtel Ritz is open to customers once more.

The Ritz, which reopened on Place Vendôme overnight following four years of renovations and a fire earlier this year, first opened its doors 118 years and a couple of days ago, on June 1, 1898, and quickly became one of the most famous hotels in the world. It is currently owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian billionaire whose son, Dodi, was Diana’s boyfriend and died in the same car crash as the “people’s princess”.

The reopened hotel houses 142 state-of-the-art rooms compared to its previous non-air conditioned 159 and also sports a larger ballroom, a summer garden restaurant and the world’s first spa by Chanel. Coco herself died in the hotel after living there for the better part of three decades.

The Belle Époque main hallway and staircase remain untouched but for a new coat of paint and afternoon teas are set to return in the famous Salon Proust. The author of Remembrance of Things Past, who is to said to have written parts of the multi-volume masterpiece in the hotel’s garden café, also has a book-lined suite named after him.

Actually, authors are well-represented here. F. Scott Fitzgerald has a suite named after him. Hemingway, unsurprisingly, has a bar.

Like everything else in the hotel, there’s a story behind this. In August 1944, the famous novelist, who was a war correspondent for Collier’s at the time, rocked up at the hotel with group of Resistance fighters and a machine gun and demanded to see the Nazis.

“Where are the Germans? I have come to liberate the Ritz.”

“Monsieur,” the hotel’s manager, Claude Auzello, replied. “They left a long time ago – and I cannot let you enter with a weapon.” Hemingway put the gun away, went inside and promptly ran up a tab for 51 dry martinis. The legend of the bar’s liberation was born.

In 1956, Charles Ritz would return to Hemingway a steamer trunk that the author had left in the hotel basement in 1930, more than a quarter of a century earlier. This contained the notebooks that would inspire him to write A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s.

“When I dream of afterlife in heaven,” he once said, “the action always takes place in the Paris Ritz.”

Initially scheduled to re-open in 2014, and then again in March this year, the hotel was damaged by a rooftop fire in January. While the renovations were originally budgeted at about A$216 million, the delays and the fire have since seen that number blow out to about $A610 million.

They’ll probably make that back pretty quickly, however. After all, a room at the Ritz will set you back a cool A$2000 per night.