Villa-des-Prés – a private collection on Rue de Buci

On the curve of Rue de Buci, a street Apollinaire singled out for its particular atmosphere, a cut-stone apartment block built in 1911 has become Villa-des-Prés, a 34-room hotel that treats the whole of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as a private art collection. The hotel opened its doors on 1 December 2023, at the end of a three-year renovation that stripped the building back to its original stonework and wrought-iron gate before interior designer Bruno Borrione rebuilt it, floor by floor, as a sequence of warm, contemporary apartments. Gallery owner Amélie du Chalard commissioned more than fifty original paintings from eleven French artists specifically for the hotel's walls, so that every room and corridor reads as part of one considered, well-travelled collection rather than a hotel scheme. It is a confidential, interior sort of luxury rather than a grand one, closer to a Left Bank apartment than a palace, and the MICHELIN Guide recognises it with one Key.

01The house

The building dates from 1911, raised in cut stone with balconies and bow windows that follow the gentle curve of Rue de Buci. A three-year renovation brought it back to a fresher, more luminous state, keeping the wrought-iron ornaments of the original gate as the one visible trace of its former life as an apartment block. Bruno Borrione, trained as a cabinet-maker at the Ecole Boulle before working alongside Philippe Starck and Jean-Michel Wilmotte on hotels from Miami's Delano to Rio's Fasano, led the interior design; the brief was to build the atmosphere of a private house whose furniture had accumulated over a lifetime rather than arrived all at once.

On the ground floor, rosewood panels line the walls, stucco traces geometric patterns across the ceilings, and the floor alternates pale travertine with black Saint Laurent marble. A stairwell lit by stained-glass windows made specially for the space carries ochre and yellow light up through each floor, part of an acoustic overhaul that deconstructed and recomposed the upper storeys to absorb the city's traffic noise.

02Rooms and suites

The hotel counts 34 rooms and suites spread over seven floors, fourteen of them suites, arranged across six categories: Superior rooms of 22 to 24m² facing Rue de Buci, Deluxe rooms overlooking the inner patio, Junior Suites, Suites with a separate reception area, Prestige Suites with a balcony or bow window, and 65m² top-floor Apartments.

Insider tip

No on-site restaurant; nearest metro Mabillon (line 10), a minute's walk away.

Each room is finished in leather headboards, brass bedside tables, wrought-iron desks and alabaster lamp shades, with mosaic bathrooms set behind trompe-l'oeil doors. Above every bed hangs a large abstract canvas made specifically for that wall, drawn from a pool of eleven French artists; the six whose work recurs most often through the bedrooms and public rooms are François Bonnel, Pola Carmen, Charlotte Culot, Frédéric Heurlier-Cimolai, Virginie Hucher and Ludovic Phillipon.

Two suites on the seventh floor dispense with mouldings altogether, built as pure penthouses beneath the eaves. Each has a semicircular private terrace that works as a rooftop observatory over the roofs of the Louvre, the dome of the Institut de France, the Tour Saint-Jacques and the bell tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés church lining up with the Eiffel Tower.

03The bar

A magnificent mahogany-toned bar opens off the ground floor, deep armchairs and noble materials built for an espresso at breakfast or a glass of champagne at the end of the day. Leather, wood and brass gleam above oversized rugs, and a curving glass wall gives onto the patio's vertical garden, where guests can take their signature cocktails outdoors whenever the weather allows.

04Spa and wellbeing

Down a staircase lit by the building's stained glass, the wellness area is decorated almost entirely in white, a deliberately hidden-away counterpoint to the street outside. Its centrepiece is a 13-metre indoor pool faced by a large half-moon sauna, with treatments and massages offered by in-house therapists in intimate surroundings and a glass-walled fitness room open around the clock for cardio, yoga or Pilates.

05The neighbourhood

Rue de Buci is the street Apollinaire praised for its particular atmosphere, and little has dimmed since: the Seine is a stone's throw away, Boulevard Saint-Germain a few steps further, and the hotel sits inside one of the densest concentrations of galleries, bookshops and publishing houses in Paris. The same pavements and café terraces once belonged to Sartre, Beauvoir, Hemingway, Picasso and Fitzgerald, a literary and artistic inheritance the hotel leans into rather than away from. The nearest metro is Mabillon, on line 10, little more than a minute's walk from addresses along the street, with Odéon and Saint-Germain-des-Prés stations close behind.

06Making the most of a stay

Amélie du Chalard's own gallery, Amelie Maison d'Art, is a few streets away on Rue Séguier, and guests curious about the artists on their bedroom walls can arrange a private viewing there. A Taschen bookshop sits close by too, echoing the coffee-table art books left on every nightstand. The hotel has no restaurant of its own, so a stay here works best paired with the neighbourhood's own tables; reserve the rooftop Apartment for a sunset drink on its private terrace before heading out, or swim a length of the pool beneath the half-moon sauna to unwind before dinner.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.