Hotel Particulier Montmartre

Hotel Particulier Montmartre

There is no sign on Rue Junot, no number on the gate, and the gate itself is locked. You ring a bell, someone lets you in, and you follow a cobblestone alleyway into a garden that has no business existing in the middle of Paris, lush and enclosed and suddenly very quiet. This is the approach to Hôtel Particulier Montmartre, and the deliberate obscurity is not affectation. The hotel has five suites. It does not need to be found by anyone who is not already looking for it. The building is a Directoire mansion that once belonged to the Hermès family, and the garden, which is the largest hotel garden in the capital, was landscaped by Louis Bénech, the same hand behind recent work at Versailles. The suites range from 35 to 85 square metres and each has been handed to a different contemporary artist to design, so no two rooms share a register: one is wallpapered floor to ceiling in a winter garden of green trellis and arboreal prints, another evokes a Hong Kong film in deep reds and Chinoiserie, another has beamed ceilings painted red and a swing chair and a Parisian panorama including the Eiffel Tower. The effect throughout is of a private house owned by someone with very good taste and a serious contemporary art habit, which is more or less what it is. Le Très Particulier, the bar tucked into the garden, opens in the evening and runs until two in the morning. It is one of those places that functions as both a neighbourhood secret and a destination in its own right, the cocktails are precise, the atmosphere is the kind that Paris does effortlessly when it is not trying. Le Grand Salon serves breakfast through to dinner and weekend brunch. Sacré-Cœur is ten minutes on foot; the rest of Montmartre, including the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, is walkable in most directions. This is a hotel for people who find ordinary Paris hotels, however well appointed, a little impersonal. Five suites means the staff know who you are. The garden means you have somewhere to be that is not a restaurant or a lobby. The art means the room itself is worth spending time in, rather than just sleeping in. The short version: Five artist-designed suites in a hidden Directoire mansion off Avenue Junot, with the largest hotel garden in Paris and a bar that the neighbourhood has claimed as its own.