At Taillevent, near the Arc de Triomphe, Valérie Vrinat d'Indy hopes that by maintaining the style of the deluxe town-house restaurant she inherited two years ago she can ensure its future.
After all, that quiet 8-year-old girl who has been parked in a deluxe London town house for the day might as well be a piece of furniture.
Many of the unlicensed services only provide deluxe transportation, Lincoln Town Cars and the like.
Thousands of vacation homes are engulfing the perimeters of historic cities, and entire resort towns — with deluxe spas, boutiques and yacht clubs — are springing up on virgin land along the coasts.
The sessions for "Darkness," recently chronicled in the HBO documentary "The Promise," are now the subject of "The Promise: The Darkness On the Edge of Town Story," a deluxe box set designed like the notebook in which Springsteen jotted down his gripping tales of alienated youth and deferred American dreams.
"I saw the 'Town' DVD," he said, pointing to a deluxe edition of his second movie.
While the Cabo resort corridor bulges with deluxe vacation-home developments and popular nightclubs, the small town of El Pescadero — just south of Todos Santos — is often described as an agricultural oasis, full of farms growing tomatoes, peppers, avocados and other crops.
Today, the swellest place to stay in town is the Villa Bereka, a sort of deluxe pension in the heights above the city where every suite is done in a different local motif, and where the guests are obliged to eat together as part of the Georgian cultural experience promoted by the owners, Ramaz and Natasha Chkhikvadze.
But for someone who has stayed in run-down hotels in small-town China or Latin America, even spots like the Deluxe felt, well, luxurious.
In the 1930s the town's Radium Palace Hotel was widely known as a deluxe hotel.
