The left bank has the Eiffel Tower, and the view from the suite is brilliant at night. However looking to the right one can see the rooftop of the Louvre, barely a ten minute walk away if one can resist the temptations of Parisian cafes and patisseries in keeping the stroll brief.
Set in a quiet backwater just off the fashionable Boulevard St. Germaine, with its designer boutiques and couturiers, galleries and antique shops this was one of the first designer boutique hotels when it had its major refurbishment in the early 1990’s. A further ‘soft’ refurb in 2002 has kept this hotel fashionable and trendy and it remains popular with the French legal profession, writers and the media as well as with business men, helped by the location of the French Board of Trade just across the road.
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| Rollover this lobby set piece to see the bar |
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:: Panoramic Views
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Originally built as an hotel in the 1920’s this is a classical Parisian building which retains a modern but very French style. Creating a boutique from a building such as this is fine with a clean canvas, but here the designer has kept some of the original features and furniture and wedded the whole together to create a fashionable and chic interior as well as a popular hotel.
The eclectic mix is evident in the entrance lobby with the heavy draught excluding drapes a traditional Parisian solution to keeping warmth in. Also traditional is the lounge with its open log fire, and now a rarity to Anglo-Saxon eyes, the scatter of ashtrays for the inveterate Gauloise smokers who mock the French anti-smoking rules. The lobby is spacious and a strong sense of theatre is created by the materials and framing of the Reception desk. The sense of theatre is also present in the small restaurant with its over sized bar-cum-waiter station.
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Above the canopy is the classic French canopy (rollover to wave the flag)and the designer has been very successful in creating an interior that is classically French whilst modern at the same time - not 'minimaliste' but 'moderne'.The result is both warm and stylish, welcoming and chic - "ambience intemporelles chic et cosy".
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The restaurant is small and informal, but has quite large tables and is very popular as a meeting area. Whilst the Navigator (who once again guided me through the Place de la Concorde to approach this one way street from the correct end) and I had breakfast, on an adjacent table was a French pop star (is there another beside Johnny Halliday?) being interviewed whilst laptops and piles of papers proliferated amongst the leisure players and serious shoppers as the days working breakfasts bloomed.
Frosted glass to the street was balanced at the rear by a tiny light well turned into a stage for a magnificent ‘parlour palm’. The adjacent lounge was comfortably furnished with a large upholstered bench cum sofa, leather armchairs and the log fire, not lit in the mild spring weather but obviously well used at other times. The restaurant spills out onto the sidewalk outside in typical French manner, doubling the number of covers in the tourist season.
Rising serpentine around the glass walled elevator is the staircase to the bedroom floors just made for the grand entrance, to be swept down with all the glamour this hotel casually carries so well. Reversing its course it becomes less romantic and utilitarian in timber to the meeting room on the lower levels – and perhaps one of the most successful small pieces of design, an intimate and warm meeting room being created without any natural light. The use of natural materials such as warm timbers and stone, leather and lighting diffused through a timber venetian blind created a space that was beautifully light as well as very quiet without windows.
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