HotelChatter

Check out the rather nauseating virtual tour to get an idea of how curtainless bay windows and swimming-pool style tiles in the bathroom can be transformed into a $650-a-night luxury hotel with the simple addition of a view of the Eiffel Tower, a (truly) spitting-distance location near the Seine, and a bit of publicity.

The Palais de Tokyo is Paris's modern art museum, a huge, imposing old building with enough conceptual, minimalist, zombie, ready-made and mutant art to fill, well, a good-sized museum. Perhaps it's because they couldn't fit any more in that they plonked the Hotel Everland on the roof. For the geeks amongst you, it's a 35 square metre, 10.5 ton fibreglass compartment and needed a 350-ton crane to lift it up there.

During the day it' a tourist attraction, or rather, a work of art like the rest of the works of art at the Palais de Tokyo. So don't think you can go leaving dirty socks and half-packed suitcases around the place - check-in's after 6pm and you're kicked out after breakfast. Guests are, however, encouraged to leave their mark, by adding to the record collection, scribbling notes for future residents in the guest book, nicking the towels....

The designers, Swiss goddess Sabina Lang and San Francisco-born Daniel Baumann (they like to be known as L/B), came up with the idea of a travelling one-room hotel in 2002 and built the baby at Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. It then flew to the roof of Leipzig's Museum of Contemporary Art and it's now, since November 2007, sitting on the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

So What Is Art?
So although the Hotel Everland teamed up with the trendy Hotel Sezz for its Paris stay, don't go thinking it's a hotel. Rather, as Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art in New York, instructs us, "Everland avoids every attempt at categorization and provides a night to think about the impact of contemporary art in our system of thought."

It's fitting that the art/hotel/design/spaceship question is brought up in Paris - it was the French artist Duchamp, after all, who started the whole 'What is Art?' debate back in 1917, by submitting a urinal to an prestigious modern art show in New York. The Hotel Everland might be a slightly classier way of expressing it, but the question's still very much the same.

Arty rates
€333 ($488) a night Tues-Thurs and €444 ($650) Fri and Sat with two bottles of Veuve Clicquot included in the price.

Booking system sounds like an absolute nightmare - something about booking exactly two months in advance with a random chance of being picked from an estimated 40,000 people (yes, that's 40,000 people) and no waiting list - but you may have better luck booking a daily guided tour from the museum.

The Hotel Everland'll be nesting on the Palais de Tokyo until the end of December 2008. Where next? No-one knows and no-one's telling. Mars, we bet.