The Hoxton, Paris

The Hoxton, Paris

The 2nd arrondissement is the part of Paris that people who live in Paris tend to know better than people who visit it, which is a reasonable indicator of quality. Rue Montorgueil is here, one of the last working market streets in central Paris, and the covered passages, Panoramas, Vivienne, and the Galerie Véro-Dodat, are all within walking distance, relics of pre-Haussmann Paris that have survived by being genuinely useful rather than merely decorative. The Hoxton took an 18th-century hôtel particulier on Rue du Sentier, once home to Etienne Rivié, a counsellor to Louis XIV, and turned it into 172 rooms without losing the building. The original spiral staircase, the courtyard, the proportions of the grand residence: all of it intact, which given the scale of the operation is the first thing worth saying. The rooms were designed by Humbert & Poyet and range in a Hoxton-characteristic way from Shoebox to Biggy, which is a useful degree of honesty in a city where room sizes are rarely discussed with candour. The better rooms have terraces over the central courtyard, chevron timber floors, mid-century touches referencing Jean Prouvé, and the kind of bathroom that makes a small room feel larger than it is. Rivié on the ground floor is an all-day brasserie with a modern French menu that draws the neighbourhood as reliably as hotel guests, which is the correct test of a hotel restaurant in Paris. Jacques Bar, at the top of the spiral staircase, is intimate and cocktail-serious. Planche, the courtyard wine bar, pours exclusively biodynamic and organic labels, which in this arrondissement is less a statement than an expectation. This is a hotel that works for people who find the palace hotel circuit alienating and the standard boutique too anonymous. The Hoxton has a formula and it executes it well, and the building it chose in Paris is better than most of its European counterparts. The short version: A 172-room boutique hotel in an 18th-century hôtel particulier in the 2nd arrondissement, with the original spiral staircase and courtyard intact, an all-day brasserie that the neighbourhood uses, and rooms designed with more honesty about Parisian proportions than most.