Cour des Vosges

Cour des Vosges begins in a shop window. Under the arcades of the Place des Vosges, behind the glass of a ground-floor shopfront, its café serves breakfast, cake and dinner to whoever walks in, Parisians included. The hotel is upstairs.

That is closer to the square's original idea than any palace would be. When Henri IV laid out the Place des Vosges in 1605, he was not planning grand townhouses. The square was meant to help revive the city's trade after years of civil war, and its thirty-six brick and stone pavilions, nearly identical, were built with shops in the galleries under the arcades, rooms above, and an open square in the middle for everyone. Courtiers and nobles moved in soon enough, and the shops gradually disappeared. Four centuries later, one of those houses has gone back to living above the shop.

It has only twelve rooms, and every one of them looks onto the garden, something no hotel on the square had offered before. The house is the former Hôtel de Montbrun, listed since 1954, and the rooms keep what the building gave them: painted ceiling beams, old terracotta floors, ceilings rising to five metres. To that the decorators added four-poster beds, Louis XIII chairs alongside pieces from the 1970s, and books chosen by a bookseller in Fontainebleau rather than bought by the metre. At the top, two rooms sit under the roof timbers at the end of a narrow staircase, and from one bath you look across the rooftops to the column at the Bastille.

What the hotel leaves out is just as telling. There is no lounge to speak of and no grand lobby; downstairs there is the café and a vaulted room with a Roman bath, and a host and a butler on hand at any hour. The square does the rest. Its garden of lime and chestnut trees is the view from every window, the arcades are the way home, and the Marais starts at the door. Staying here feels less like checking into a hotel than borrowing a flat at the finest address in the neighbourhood.

That has its price, and not only on the bill. The smallest rooms measure twenty-six square metres, the top floor asks for some climbing, and anyone who wants a spa, a pool or a lounge to linger in should look elsewhere. By day the square belongs to visitors, and the arcades are busy. It suits people who already know Paris and would like, for a few days, to live in it: a morning coffee downstairs, a walk under the arcades, a long afternoon in a room with tall windows and a garden outside.

Every evening the gates of the garden are locked, at a quarter to six in winter and later in summer. After that, the oldest square in Paris belongs to the people who live on it, and for a few nights, that includes you.