Hello and Happy New Year, or perhaps I should say Bonne Année! I’ve just got back from a two week break, which included a hop over the channel to Paris for New Year’s with friends and family. On the last evening of our trip, we treated ourselves to a stay at Hotel Panache – a little, bijou design hotel in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.
We normally stay on a futon at the in-laws, so this chic room with its elegantly retro interior and stylish cane bed felt like the Parisian dream. A one night stay was the perfect cause for celebration before we returned on the Eurostar; back to our everyday routines and responsibilities in the cold light of January. After so much time spent with others over Christmas and the holidays (as lovely as that was of course!), it felt good to steal a romantic evening away just the two of us.
Conceived by hotelier Adrien Gloaguen, Hotel Panache opened in 2016 in Paris’s cultural centre, a short stroll from the Grand Magazines on Boulevard Haussmann, the cabaret music hall of Folies Bergère and the opera at Palais Garnier. Taking up the corner of a 19th century block where rue Geoffroy-Marie meets rue Faubourg Montmartre, the hotel is small but perfectly formed.
At the front of the hotel is Café Panache, a contemporary, bistro-style restaurant that serves a modern French menu with a Mediterranean twist. The cafe also offers a breakfast buffet for hotel guests everyday (€18 per person in addition to the room fee). Behind the restaurant, accessed via another set of doors, is the hotel reception. Inside, the look is luxe yet understated, with dark wood floors, velvet upholstered seating and an impressive, solid marble bar for the concierge.
Hotel Panache has 40 bedrooms, ranging from single rooms to family rooms and spacious suites. The best rooms at the top of the seven storey building have a little balcony overlooking the surrounding, typically Parisian, Haussmann architecture, where you can enjoy breakfast alfresco. We stayed in a classic double room on the first floor, generously sized with a wall of built-in window seating and a squishy sofa opposite the bed.
The interiors were designed by Paris-based Dorothée Meilichzon. With the corner building reminding her of the Flatiron Building in New York, she used the steel frame structure as inspiration for the geometric patterns on the floors and walls of the hotel. The rooms have a pastel-shaded retro feel that fuses Parisian style with abstract elements of New York architecture.
The carpet is lined with triangular shapes, while a variety of graphic wallpapers have been used across the rooms. But somehow it’s not too much, even for my minimalist taste – the patterns harmonise in tone and have a soft, faded quality with pale duck egg blues, navy blues and grey hues. The eye-catching cane bed was my favourite design detail – it doesn’t take much to give a wow factor to a space.
I appreciated the little details too – the retro, white switches and plug sockets, and the striped cushions that made the bed look ever so inviting. Also, if you book through Mr and Mrs Smith, members get a little treat on arrival – we got a box of chocolates from one of Paris’s oldest chocolatiers, yum!
All in all it was a truly lovely stay – we enjoyed dinner in the oldest covered passage in Paris, at nearby passage des Panoramas (go to Racines, it’s fantastic) and woke up in wonderfully crisp white sheets and a coffee brought to the room, what could be better!
Pros: The central location, the generous sized rooms with enough space for a chair/sofa, the stylish interiors, the soft bedding and the clean bathrooms, the fairly affordable price if you book ahead (compared to some other hotels).
Cons: From an eco-friendly point of view, the shampoo, conditioner etc come in mini bottles (alongside plastic wrapped cotton wool pads and plastic bottles of water) – now I like to see hotels that have refillable full-size bottles in the bathrooms. We skipped breakfast, thinking it was a little too expensive, preferring to grab a croissant at a cafe while we were out. There’s only tea offered in the room, so we chose to order €5 coffees up to the room – being a coffee fiend in need of a cup first thing, I always offer top marks to any hotel that has a coffee machine or cafetière in the room…
Rooms from £150 a night for a classic double, book here.
And here’s some extra snaps I took while in Paris – you can find all my tips and favourite places that I’ve discovered over the past eight years in my ultimate Paris Travel Guide.
