Le Grand Hôtel Cayré

Le Grand Hôtel Cayré

The stretch of Saint-Germain between Boulevard Raspail and Rue du Bac is the quieter, more residential version of the arrondissement, the one that functions as a neighbourhood rather than a destination. Le Bon Marché is five minutes away, the Musée d'Orsay is ten, and the Seine is close enough to walk to before breakfast without it feeling like an itinerary. The building dates from 1920 and in its first incarnation it was the kind of hotel that Jean Cocteau and James Joyce found congenial, which is a useful piece of information about the neighbourhood it inhabits. The current renovation, by Michaelis Boyd for the Miiro group, keeps the Art Deco stone façade and the balconies and gives the interiors a Roaring Twenties reference that earns its place given the history. The 123 rooms and two suites are designed around the idea of a Parisian apartment: pale wood floors, antique lamps, hand-crafted beds, reading corners, and Le Labo in the bathrooms, some rooms with balconies and a handful with Eiffel Tower views that are worth requesting at booking. Annette, the ground floor brasserie named after the French-German writer Annette Kolb, a longtime resident of the original hotel, is an all-day operation with a seasonal French menu and the kind of room that draws the neighbourhood in the evenings. Officine Bac, the speakeasy bar tucked behind it, is intimate and cocktail-serious, the right place to end an evening without going far. This is a hotel that works for people who want Saint-Germain without the palace hotel circuit, and who find the idea of a neighbourhood hotel in the proper sense, one that has a brasserie the street uses and a bar worth staying in for, more appealing than a lobby with a concierge and a Michelin star. The short version: A 123-room Art Deco hotel on the quiet side of Saint-Germain, renovated with a Roaring Twenties sensibility, named after the literary crowd that once kept rooms here, with an all-day brasserie and a speakeasy bar the neighbourhood has made its own.