HotelChatter

Tags: Paris Design Hotels / Paris Hotel Guide / Monica Guy / → All Tags

Paris Hotel Guide: More Design Hotels

Yesterday, our special Paris Hotel Guide correspondent Monica Guy sounded off on some of the city's most popular and classic design hotels. But she has more recommendations for those of us clueless about where to stay in the City of Light. Here's a quick hit list of some further design hotels.

Design and boutique hotels are popping up and blowing down all over Paris, all of the time. But if you get rich quick or want to sleep with someone who just has, you can also try these:

· Hotel Odeon St-Germain. The lady speaking on the website has, presumably, the kind of voice middle-aged businessmen find attractive.
· Hotel La Trémoille. Ignore any nasty reviews about this place's restaurant, previously a rather unwelcoming Sir Terence Conran-signed place known as Senso. It's recently had a makeover and despite gaining the even sillier name of Louis2, has jumped up several steps on the good restaurant ladder.
· Hotel Keppler. We'll talk more about this in our "Paris for Lovers" guide later this week.
· Hotel Sezz Designed by Christopher Pillock - I mean, Pillet, with several awards for being hot and hip. Never been, but the website insists you'll be welcomed by your own personal assistant, which is funny as I don't think I have one.
· Le Placide Opened just last year opposite the fashionable Bon Marché store, designed by Phillipe Starck's friend Bruno Borrione. Only 11 rooms and they're always full, so book early.
· Murano Calls itself an 'urban resort', which means nothing, but word is it's a techno-filled hotel that lives up to its name for rock&roll and pop-art.

Related Stories:
· Paris Hotel Guide: 'Classic' Design Hotels [HotelChatter]

Tags: Paris Design Hotels / Paris Hotel Guide / Monica Guy / → All Tags

Paris Hotel Guide: 'Classic' Design Hotels

This week we have a very special report from Monica Guy who had done a brilliant job of telling us where to go, what to see and what to avoid in Paris over on Jaunted. Now, she's breaking down the hotel scene for us. This time, doling out her picks for design hotels. If you have a specific question about Paris accommodations, hit us on the tipline, or just comment below, and we will do our best to get you some sort of answer. Enjoy.

Hotels in Paris could, for a long time, be summed up by a classic verse from Simon & Garfunkel's At the Zoo:

Orang-utans are skeptical
of changes in their cages
and the zoo-keepers
are very fond of rum

The French monkeys woke up and worked out how to open their cages a few years ago, when tourists started throwing money into the tropical fish pond for luck.

There's a turf war going on between the old classic, plodding elephants and rhinos of the hotel business and the young cub designers who want to rip the old taffeta curtains to shreds and line the walls with rhino skin and ivory doorknobs.

These wild cats - top designers like Jacques Garcia, Christian Lacroix, Christophe Pillet, Andrée Putman, Frédéric Mechiche - are busy pissing in strategic locations 'round the city to mark out their territory, but there's an awful lot of inter-species mating going on behind the bushes.

So it's possible not to know whether you're staying at a luxury hotel, a design hotel, a boutique hotel, a luxury design boutique hotel, a post-modern boho hostel or a pre-Gothic minimalist 'space' complete with chamber pots and Wi-Fi.

more ›