Relais Christine

Relais Christine

On the rue Christine, a short street completed in 1607 after the building of the Pont Neuf and named for Christine de France, daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis, stands a townhouse built over the vestiges of the Saint-Denis College of the Grands-Augustins Abbey, founded in 1231 by Saint Louis. The street-front facade was rebuilt in 1898 by the architect Debrie, in the same tradition of Parisian hôtel particulier design that produced the Palais de l'Élysée and the Hôtel Matignon a few streets away, though this one is smaller, quieter, and has spent most of the last century as a private address rather than a seat of government. It became a hotel in 1979 and has been owned by the same French family since, who converted forty-eight rooms and suites out of a building never designed to be one, which is part of why no two rooms are quite alike. The interiors were reworked by the designer Laura Gonzalez, who kept the 13th-century stone arches where they survived and layered in antiques, Toile de Jouy, canopy beds, and fabrics from Pierre Frey and Hermès, so that a room can feel like a family bedroom that happens to have Carrara marble in the bathroom. Several of the garden suites open directly onto a private terrace and a courtyard planted with wisteria and climbing roses, and breakfast is served in what was once the abbey's vaulted undercroft, the same vaults that now house the spa, run with Guerlain, with a hot tub and a Finnish sauna tucked into stone that predates the street above it by four centuries. Guests have use of the hotel's bicycles and a private garage, and the lounge, with its fireplace and honour bar, is the kind of room where a stranger might end up staying for a second drink. It reads less like a hotel and more like a well-kept Parisian relative's house, one with a spa in the cellar and staff who remember your name from a previous stay without making a display of it. The scale keeps things intimate rather than grand, there is no lobby to speak of in the conventional sense, just a sequence of small, low-lit rooms that discourage lingering strangers and encourage the ones who belong. It suits people who want Saint-Germain-des-Prés at their doorstep, the Seine and Notre-Dame a short walk away, Le Procope and Café de Flore closer still, without wanting the scale or anonymity of a grand hotel. You should not come if you want a view, a rooftop, or a building that announces itself from the street, this one gives almost nothing away from the outside. You should come for the quiet of the courtyard rooms, the abbey vaults underfoot, and the sense of staying somewhere that has belonged to one family for over forty years and still runs like it. The short version: A 48-room townhouse hotel on a quiet street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, built over a 13th-century abbey, family-owned since 1979, with a Guerlain spa in the vaults and Laura Gonzalez's antiques-and-Hermès interiors above them.