[5] The hotel was completely modernized between 1935 and 1937, to designs by architect Duiliu Marcu, with the exterior redesigned in the Art Deco style.

"[6] The New York Times foreign correspondent C. L. Sulzberger wrote in his memoir A Long Row of Candles that as World War II was approaching, he settled into the Athénée Palace "to enjoy my wait for war… This was a comfortable establishment with excellent service…a corrupt staff always seeking to change a customer's money at black-market rates, and continual competition by ladies of easy or nonexistent virtue to share the warmth of a client's bed.

"[7] "Countess" R. G. Waldeck wrote of the hotel in the same era, "Here was the heart of Bucharest, topographically, artistically, intellectually, politically—and, if you like, morally.

The prostitutes in the lobby and in the bar and in the nightclub reported directly to their employers; the free-speaking bons vivants and Romanian intellectuals hanging around the café, not to mention a number of the guests, had been planted.

The project team, comprising architect Nicolae Pruncu and engineers Radu Mircea and Mihai Ionescu, encountered severe technical difficulties in binding the old building with the new one.

[12] The hotel is a primary setting in Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy,[13] which was later filmed as the 1987 BBC miniseries Fortunes of War, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.