Hotel Le Grand Mazarin

Hotel Le Grand Mazarin

The Marais is the arrondissement that Paris uses to show off, and it earns the attention. The architecture is 17th-century hotel particulier and the streets are dense with galleries, concept stores, the old Jewish quarter, the best falafel in Paris on Rue des Rosiers, and a general sense that whoever designed the neighbourhood understood that a city should be worth walking through at any hour. Le Grand Mazarin is on the corner of Rue de la Verrerie and Rue des Archives, two minutes from the Hôtel de Ville and six from the Centre Pompidou, which is either convenient or dangerous depending on your relationship with contemporary art museums. The hotel has 61 rooms and suites designed by Martin Brudnizki, the Stockholm-born London designer whose signature is maximalism done with precision, not chaos. French classicism is the base layer, colour and pattern and a genuine wit are applied on top, and the result is one of those hotels that makes people reach for the Wes Anderson comparison, which is a shorthand for a specific kind of deliberate, joyful visual excess. Each room is different enough to be worth specifying at booking. The underground pool, eight metres under a stone vaulted ceiling painted with a Jean Cocteau-inspired fresco, is one of the more unexpectedly beautiful spaces a Paris hotel has produced in recent years. Boubalé, the restaurant, is the other reason the hotel has found its crowd. Assaf Granit, the Jerusalem-born chef behind some of the more interesting cooking in Europe, serves a personal interpretation of Ashkenazi and Levantine cuisine, which in the context of the Marais is both historically resonant and genuinely delicious. The bar is serious about cocktails and popular enough with the neighbourhood to feel like somewhere rather than just somewhere to wait. This is a hotel that draws the fashion and design crowd by instinct, which means it can be a little social in the lobby, and is extremely well located for anyone whose Paris is the Marais rather than the 8th. The rooms are good, Boubalé is the reason guests stay in for dinner, and the pool is the unexpected pleasure. The short version: A 61-room maximalist boutique hotel in the Marais, designed by Martin Brudnizki with a Cocteau-frescoed underground pool and Assaf Granit's Boubalé restaurant downstairs. The Marais in its current form, done very well.