Until recently, few Parisian hotels dared to distract from the classic aesthetics of the city itself. The décor of its gilded palace hotels, single-minded embassies of French heritage, was, largely, fussy and excessively impersonal, as if a misplaced streak of color could break the city’s spell. Today the capital is finally overcoming its self-seriousness, thanks in part to its vibrant post-Brexit ascendancy in the contemporary arts and culture scenes. Many of its new hotels seek to delight rather than simply impress, and often conjure other worlds, as in the Marais’s Maison Proust, a candlelit Belle Époque fantasy half-hidden behind tasseled indigo velvet curtains, or the nearby Le Grand Mazarin, fashioned by the London-based Swedish designer Martin Brudnizki from contrasting styles and eras, all in a swirl of candy colors. “It took longer than New York and London,” says the Italian architect and designer Fabrizio Casiraghi, “but Paris is at last discovering the kind of small hotel that has something to say.”
La Fantaisie
Extroverted new hot spots typically pop up in the fashionable areas of the Right Bank, like the Marais, and the lively streets around the former red-light district Pigalle, now home to La Fantaisie. Also designed by Brudnizki, the pistachio and pastel yellow 73-room hotel, which opened in July, is a fanciful bucolic escape, with fruit trees growing on its rooftop bar and botanical mosaics tiling a trio of Roman-bath-style dipping pools; a dainty trellis-clad garden adjoins the California-inspired restaurant Golden Poppy, overseen by the San Francisco-based French chef Dominique Crenn. Rooms from about $440 a night.
L’Eldorado
Ahead of Paris’s upcoming Summer Olympic Games, and amid a yearslong tourism boom, a handful of attention-worthy boutique hotels are also arriving in quieter and lesser-known pockets of the city. L’Eldorado, which opened this July following a four-year renovation by the French hoteliers Pierre and Élodie Moussié and Sophie Richard, sits in the villagelike heart of the 17th Arrondissement, the upscale but unpretentious Batignolles. The romantic new neighborhood institution exudes a retro, cheetah-print and rattan-accented glamour that extends to a detached 19th-century house at the rear of a festive courtyard garden. Entering one of its 26 guest rooms evokes the sensation of slipping into a maximally patterned Victorian jewel box, cushioned from ceiling to bedspread in a lush House of Hackney…
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