Brach Paris

There are hens on the roof of Brach, a hotel in one of Paris's most respectable neighbourhoods. They live among vegetables and herbs, with the Eiffel Tower on the skyline. Below them, the well-behaved streets of Passy go about their business while one former postal sorting centre hosts a rather improbable amount of social life. It is not what most visitors come to this part of Paris expecting. That is rather the point.

The building was a 1970s postal sorting centre, seven thousand square metres of determined practicality. Philippe Starck took it on in 2018 and imagined something between a hotel, an eccentric private house and a neighbourhood club. Downstairs, the restaurant belongs as much to Paris as to the people sleeping upstairs. There is a long open kitchen, food from around the Mediterranean and a room that can be busy from breakfast until late. The locals do not disappear when the tourists arrive. Brach has given a largely residential district a place to go out.

The hotel itself begins more discreetly on the first floor, away from the restaurant's bustle. Starck has filled it with rosewood, leather, stone and objects that appear to have arrived from several very different lives. Art Brut shares space with surrealist oddities, while paintings by his daughter Ara bring colour to the walls. There is a little too much to inspect at once, perhaps, but it avoids the usual problem of a design hotel: looking as though nobody has ever touched anything.

The bedrooms are warm and rather theatrical, with fluted glass, polished wood, intriguing books and a minibar reimagined as a tiny shop. They are not uniformly enormous. A Classic measures twenty-four square metres; the Deluxe, at thirty-two, makes more sense for two people with luggage and plans to stay a while. The suites are another proposition altogether, opening onto planted terraces with outdoor baths or Jacuzzis. Some face the Eiffel Tower. Check the exact suite rather than assume the view comes with every expensive key.

It would be easy to mistake the sports club for another impressive amenity until you see how seriously Brach takes it. The twenty-two-metre pool is long enough for actual laps. There are boxing and Pilates classes, a hot-water pool and somewhere to recover afterwards. Local members use the club too. For a guest, this changes the rhythm of the stay: a swim before breakfast or a class between visits to museums feels like something people might do here on an ordinary Tuesday, not an indulgence reserved for holidays.

And the neighbourhood has more to offer than its reputation suggests. Passy has proper food shops and a covered market, the streets around La Muette are pleasantly lived-in, and the Bois de Boulogne gives you room to walk without having to join the queue for a monument. Rue de la Pompe métro station is close when you want a different Paris. This is not the ideal address for stumbling out of a late bar in the Marais and into bed. But there is pleasure in returning to streets that have gone quiet while your hotel has not.

The rooftop is the final piece of mischief: a kitchen garden, a henhouse, an outdoor bath and, in summer, a bar above the city. It is seasonal rather than a guaranteed evening plan, and the best views from the bedrooms are expensive. Nor is this hotel for anyone who finds Starck's collected curiosities exhausting. Yet the contrast is unusually successful. Outside, a residential Paris that tourists often overlook; inside, a hotel that has become one of the neighbourhood's reasons to go out. You might come for Brach and discover that the 16th was never quite as dull as you were told.