La Fantaisie

La Fantaisie

The 9th arrondissement is the Paris that Parisians actually use, which is a different city from the one tourists are directed toward. Rue Cadet is named after two 16th-century brothers who supplied fruit and vegetables to the royal court, and the street has retained something of that productive, neighbourhood energy: a covered market at one end, a row of wine bars and restaurants, the Folies Bergère around the corner, the Opéra Garnier twenty minutes on foot. La Fantaisie opened here in 2023, Martin Brudnizki's first Paris hotel, on a site with an interior courtyard garden that in a city of compressed proportions feels genuinely improbable. Brudnizki conceived the hotel as unfolding upward like a flower, from the botanical mosaic murals and pale green-tiled mineral pools of the basement spa, through the 63 rooms and 10 suites with their floral wallpapers and Juliet balconies, all the way to the rooftop, which is the bloom: plush vintage sofas, café tables under a lush canopy of trees and plants, and views across the Paris skyline that justify the climb. The rooms are more restrained than the common areas, which is either a relief or a disappointment depending on how much Brudnizki you can take, and the garden-facing rooms on the lower floors are the ones to request. The restaurant works a seasonal French menu under a glass conservatory roof that opens the room to the garden. The café at the front draws the neighbourhood in and makes the hotel feel lived in by the street, which is exactly the right relationship for this arrondissement. This is a hotel for people whose Paris begins north of the Seine and east of the 8th, who find the covered passages and the natural wine bars of the 9th more compelling than the palace hotel circuit. The Marais and Montmartre are both reachable on foot. The hotel is new enough to still feel like a discovery and good enough to have earned its Michelin Clef. The short version: Sixty-three rooms and ten suites on Rue Cadet in the 9th arrondissement, Brudnizki's first Paris hotel, with a garden, a botanical spa, and a rooftop that the neighbourhood has already claimed as its own.