HotelChatter

Here's another one for the list - hôtels de famille. No, wrong, they're not hotels for families. No one's quite sure what they are, or what they're for, but they're definitely the new kid on the block with the trendiest trainers. They are sort-of-design-hotels where you can put your feet up in the lobby. Well, maybe you can, I confess I never dared.

Here are our picks:

1. Hotel Bellechasse

Christian Lacroix is actually a wild cat of the fashion world with only one hotel already under his rhino-skin belt, but he jumped over the fence and pissed in the Paris hotel business this summer with Hotel Bellechasse in the trendy Left Bank area. The hotel was always there before, but he spent ten months ripping it apart and only opened it again in July. But what is it? asked the critics at the opening party. Well, I dunno, said Lacroix. "The tone is between ancient and modern, with a 'je ne sais quoi' of the future."

Je ne sais quoi either, and I hope the future doesn't really look like that. Themed rooms, all different. I guess he did one, thought, oh no, that's terrible, I'll leave it there for now and move on to the next, do a better job this time.

Or maybe he had a lot of girlfriends, and he let them do one room each. One of them was a hippy, because the Quai d'Orsay room has a huge great sun across one wall, the kind that hippies spread across the seats in their banged-up VW campervans. There's an alien painted onto the ceiling of the same room surrounded by a few lobster friends - credited to the hippy's illegitimate two-year-old son. For a look at the others, check out the website.

The staff are friendly and amazingly unpretentious, and the hotel has all the knobs and buttons you need for a luxury stay, but be careful which room you book if you're prone to nightmares.

2. Hotel Lumen

Here's another classic hôtel de famille with prices to match. This one's designed by an Italian-Swiss invader, Claudio Collucci. Here he is, coming in wanting to "reconstruct the atmosphere of Parisian cafés whilst adding modern comforts." Oh really! So what's a Parisian café? Over to George Orwell:

A tiny brick-floored room, half-underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed 'Crédit est mort'; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage with big jack-knives; and Madame F, a splendid Auvergnat peasant woman with the face of a strong-minded cow ... and extraordinarily public love-making."

Excellent.

Actually, not even the Italian Collucci could manage a level of sophistication as high as this. In fact, he created the opposite of a traditional Parisian café by sticking lights and chandeliers everywhere, cleaning the windows to let the sun in, and splashing out on some new furniture and colourful paint.

But we'll let him off, because he did a good job and he did also employ a receptionist who's the spitting image of Madame F. Slap bang in the centre next to the Louvre, with prices like a kick in the groin but worth it if someone else is picking up the tab.

3. Hôtel le A

Wear your sunglasses to this one. Hôtel le A, right in Expensive Hotel District near the Champs Elysées. A 4-star experiment by designer Frédéric Mechiche in just how much black and white and fuzz the average human mind can take before it starts to go black and white and fuzzy too. An ironic nod towards its hôtel de famille status with a (black and white) fireplace and some (black and white, design) books in a white set of shelves in the black and white bar.

White seats! No good if you spill the red wine. But don't worry, the bar only serves Bailies and black coffee. They'd make the guests dress in black and white if they could.

Someone's also graffitied on the wall. Turns out the graffiti is by a well-known conceptual artist, Fabrice Hybert. You get a bit of a break in the lift, though, which changes colour as you go up and down. I went up and down several times just to rest my eyes.

They wouldn't let me see a room, but assured me they use Daz on their white sheets in their white rooms. Whiter than white. The clientele who frequent Hôtel le A are the kind of people who wear their sunglasses in bed anyway, so they probably never realise.

Bottom Line:
Hôtels de famille don't feel much like family homes to me, although possibly I don't have the same sort of family as Lacroix, Collucci and Mechiche & co.