Pavillon De La Reine

Pavillon De La Reine

Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris, built under Henri IV and completed in 1612, and it has been looking good ever since. The arcaded red brick facades, the symmetry, the garden at the centre with its fountain and plane trees: it is one of those urban spaces that makes you understand why people have always been willing to pay a premium to be near it. The Pavillon de la Reine is on the north side, behind a door in the arcade that opens into an ivy-covered courtyard, and the transition from the square to the interior is the kind of thing that makes a hotel's reputation before a single room has been seen. The noise of the Marais disappears. The courtyard is old stone and climbing greenery and a silence that Paris does not owe anyone. The 62 rooms are individually designed across the 17th-century mansion and its extensions, stone fireplaces in some, exposed beams in others, all furnished with an attention to the building's age that reads as genuine instead of decorative. Some duplex suites have private terraces, and the garden-facing rooms have that courtyard stillness as a permanent condition. Restaurant Anne, named for Anne of Austria whose residence this once was, holds a Michelin star and is open for dinner in an intimate room that suits the history without being heavy with it. The spa runs to a jacuzzi, hammam, fitness centre, and treatments, small in scale and well used. The bar and coffee shop in the courtyard are the right way to start and end the day. This is a hotel for people who find the Marais the most interesting version of Paris and want to be inside it without being of it. The square is on the doorstep, the galleries and restaurants of the 3rd and 4th are all walkable, and the courtyard offers a quality of stillness that most Paris hotels at this price point cannot match. The short version: Sixty-two individually designed rooms in a 17th-century mansion behind Place des Vosges, with a Michelin-starred restaurant, an ivy-covered courtyard that the city cannot seem to reach, and the most quietly extraordinary address in the Marais.