Hotel Providence

Hotel Providence

On rue René Boulanger, a semi-pedestrian street in Paris's 10th arrondissement where the Porte Saint-Martin theatre district gives way to Canal Saint-Martin, an 1854 Haussmannian townhouse that spent decades as a maison close reopened in 2015 as an eighteen-room hotel, its once-derelict shell rebuilt by architect Philippe Medioni and named, without irony, Providence. It belongs to Pierre and Élodie Moussié, the couple behind Chez Jeannette, Sans-Souci, Le Mansart, Brasserie Barbès and Le Floréal, who have built their reputation across Paris's eastern arrondissements and treated this building as a house rather than another outpost. Élodie Moussié designed the interiors with her friend Sophie Richard, papering corridors and several bedrooms in House of Hackney's palm print, laying Madeleine Castaing carpets underfoot, and keeping the marble fireplaces, herringbone parquet, and ceiling moldings that survived the building's previous life. Each of the eighteen rooms differs from the next, furnished with antiques, velvet upholstery, and portrait paintings sourced from French country flea markets, and each comes with its own cocktail bar built into a beech and marble counter, complete with an ice dispenser and the makings for whatever the in-room recipe card suggests; the television has been swapped for an iMac. On the ground floor, the Providence restaurant serves raw, marinated, and wood-grilled dishes to hotel guests and to the neighbourhood regulars who fill its tables, spilling out in warmer months onto a 75 square metre garden terrace. The effect is closer to a well-connected friend's apartment than a hotel lobby, built on the idea that a maximalist, slightly theatrical version of a Parisian townhouse need not tip into pastiche when the fabric of the building, the moldings, the parquet, the fireplaces, carries as much weight as the wallpaper. It suits a guest who wants Paris without a concierge desk standing between them and the street, who will use the in-room bar on an ordinary Tuesday instead of saving it for a photograph, and who finds the inconsistency across eighteen rooms, no two alike, more interesting than a chain's uniformity. You should not come if you want a pool, a spa, or the hush of a five-star lobby staffed for that purpose: Providence has none of these, and eighteen rooms mean it books out fast during fashion weeks and long weekends. You should come for a base in the 10th that puts you closer to Canal Saint-Martin's towpath and the upper Marais's gallery streets than to the grand avenues, and for a hotel room with its own cocktail bar that reads as an invitation rather than a gimmick. The short version: An eighteen-room hotel in an 1854 Haussmannian townhouse on Paris's rue René Boulanger, opened in 2015 by Pierre and Élodie Moussié, with in-room cocktail bars, House of Hackney wallpaper, and a restaurant the neighbourhood actually uses.