Marquis Faubourg Saint Honore Hotel

Marquis Faubourg Saint Honore Hotel

At 8 rue d'Anjou, behind a carriage entrance carved with a mascaron of the god of shepherds, stands the private mansion where the Marquis de Lafayette lived from 1827 until his death in 1834, and where the playwright Sacha Guitry later kept rooms. Built by Antoine Mazin, architect to Louis XV, the mansion survived Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris intact and did not open as a hotel until 2012, arriving with just 15 suites. That scale is the point: this is the first hotel in Paris designed by Michele Bönan, and its four suite categories, Junior, Superior, Executive and Master, range widely in size, the Master twice the Junior, each carrying his restraint rather than gilt. The address sits two minutes on foot from Madeleine metro and three from Concorde, inside the Faubourg Saint-Honoré quarter, where Hermès and Chanel share pavement with Sotheby's and Christie's. Breakfast runs 7am to 10:30am on weekdays and later on Sunday, with room service available around the clock. Wellness stays deliberately small: a massage room, a spa centre and a doctor on call, backed by a gym open 24 hours with free weights and resistance machines rather than an expansive spa. Dogs travel too, for a flat fee. None of this suits anyone chasing anonymity inside a large hotel or a resort's worth of facilities; with 15 suites across four floors, the staff who check guests in are usually the ones who see them out. For a woman who has stayed in enough grand hotel lobbies to know the difference, an address with real history behind it, rather than a brand facade, is what settles the decision. A 15-suite hotel inside the 18th-century mansion where the Marquis de Lafayette once lived, steps from Madeleine in Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The first Paris hotel designed by Michele Bönan, it favors a 24-hour gym over an expansive spa and personal recognition over anonymity.