The dress code was strict for this season's most happening party in
Paris: white paper overalls, rubber boots and gloves, safety goggles,
dust mask, orange hard hat.

Oh, and the sledge hammer. Essential for smashing up the room of your
choice on the fourth floor of the Royal Monceau.

Well over 1,200 revellers ran amok into the wee hours of Friday in the
five-star hotel, a stately 265-room pile near the Arc de Triomphe
that's been a favoured haunt of the global glitterati since 1928.

Its new owner, Alexandre Allard, 39, who made his fortune in IT, is
shutting its doors for 15 months for a roof-to-cellar refit in
collaboration with celebrated designer Philippe Starck, 59.

The concept is to create, in the shell of a Roaring Twenties landmark,
the ultimate boutique hotel with a strong artistic bent.

"We're talking about a new luxury based on intelligence," said Starck
on Thursday evening as the guests started to line up outside on Avenue
Hoche. "Intelligence is sexy."

The affable Allard -- who gushed memories of his first power breakfast
at the Royal Monceau at the tender age of 18 -- envisioned "a hotel
that will be a crossroads of encounters".

"For that you need artists," he said. "People who show the way
forward."

He invited plenty to his "Demolition Party" -- US indy rockers Gossip,
Belgian electronic punk band 2 Many DJs and French rapper MC Solaar,
to name just some of the musicians.

Virtually all the Royal Monceau's contents -- the beds, the cutlery,
the minibars, you name it -- had been sold off days before, in an
auction that raked in 3.35 million euros (5.27 million dollars).

On the ground floor, transvestites pranced by the ballroom-turned-
disco, and Madonna's steamy "Justify My Love" video -- filmed in the
Royal Monceau in 1990 -- played over and over on in one of the many
Champagne and vodka bars.

Upstairs, several rooms were turned over to about a dozen contemporary
artists from France and beyond, such as China's Wang Du who fixed a
working outboard motor onto a bathtub. The room was thick with exhaust
fumes.

Down the corridor, the Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin unspooled a
video depicting an bomb blast inside the hotel. The room itself was a
deliberate mess -- prompting one American guest to remark: "Looks like
Amy Winehouse's room."

Best by far was Belgian burlesque artist Caroline Lemaire, alias
Creamy Caro, in black torsolette and four-inch red heels, lounging in
her room, oblivious to the giggling gawkers peering through a hole in
the wall.

Brilliantly voyeuristic, it captured the essential seediness the lurks
within the soul of every luxury hotel.

Upstairs, however, is where things really got down and dirty.

Leggy young things in skimpy outfits and their argumentative alpha-
male companions crowded the marble staircase for their turn to don
safety gear and have a go at the gypsum walls in rooms that once cost
up to 650 euros a night.

Hotels were certainly well built in Paris in 1928 -- it took a good
five minutes for this AFP reporter to punch a fist-sized hole between
rooms 427 and 429. The wallpaper proved especially resilient.

The night's must-have souvenir was a chunk of Royal Monceau masonry,
though some crafty guests made off with hard hats, sledge hammers,
even white bathrobes that somehow missed the auction.

Bemused by the goings-on were T-shirted labourers from the contractor
that will professionally finish gutting the hotel. Supervising the
amateurs, one of them sniffed: "We're the one who get to pick up this
mess."

Copyright 2008 Agence France Presse

Jaime