Paris, France · Boutique · ★★★★★
"Montparnasse at its most concentrated: 20 rooms designed around the neighbourhood's artistic legacy, a stone's throw from Giacometti's old studio and the best crêperies in Paris."
The building on Rue de la Grande Chaumière sits at the heart of historic Montparnasse — the street where Giacometti kept a studio, where Matisse taught, and where the concentration of ateliers that made the neighbourhood the centre of 20th-century Western art began. The Hôtel des Académies et des Arts opened in this building as a twenty-room boutique hotel with a specific brief: the rooms would reference the neighbourhood's artistic history without becoming a museum.
Designer Sophie Jacqmin worked with artist Jo Di Bona to produce a hotel where street art meets traditional Parisian decorative vocabulary. The twenty rooms are individually decorated with large-format murals, bespoke furniture, and colour palettes drawn from the Montparnasse artistic tradition. Some rooms are bold; others are subdued. All are resolved with the conviction of a designer who understood the brief. The bathrooms are marble; the bedding is quality; the WiFi works.
The hotel has no restaurant and no pool — a deliberate choice that reflects the neighbourhood's extraordinary density of independent restaurants and cafés. La Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway wrote much of The Sun Also Rises, is a fifteen-minute walk. The Rue Daguerre market street — one of the finest in Paris — is five minutes. The covered passage at Edgar Quinet hosts the most concentrated selection of Breton crêperies in the city.
The Luxembourg Gardens are a fifteen-minute walk north, which puts the hotel in direct communication with the intellectual geography of Paris's left bank: the Sorbonne, the Institut Océanographique, the Panthéon, and the cafés of Boulevard Saint-Michel. This is the Paris that produced Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and the entire post-war French intellectual tradition, and the Hôtel des Académies sits in its correct neighbourhood.
Twenty rooms, an artistic neighbourhood, and no television protocol — the Académies is the solo traveller's Montparnasse address. Rue de la Grande Chaumière is the street where Giacometti worked every morning for forty years. The neighbourhood rewards the solitary walker with the same quality of encounter that attracted its original inhabitants.
The Montparnasse honeymoon is for couples who came to Paris for its art, its cafés, and its particular quality of intellectual seriousness. The Académies provides the artistic room; the neighbourhood provides the rest. The mural room is the honeymoon choice: large format, bold colour, and the knowledge that the building is on the street where serious art happened.
Dinner at La Coupole — the great Montparnasse brasserie fifty metres away — followed by an evening walk through a neighbourhood that peaked creatively in 1924 and has been living with the distinction ever since. The Académies anniversary is for couples who find that context enhances pleasure.
Rates shown are approximate. Verify at time of booking.
The King's Suite
Monthly. No noise.