Experimental Marais

The most important change at 116 rue du Temple may be that everyone can sit down comfortably. Under the great arches of the restaurant, leather banquettes invite you to settle in for dinner. It sounds a modest achievement for a five-star hotel, but this particular building has spent much of its life trying to make people feel something considerably less comfortable.

In 2019 it opened as Sinner, a hotel with a rather elaborate joke to tell. Tristan Auer filled a former telecommunications building with stained glass, Gothic arches and candles; the staff wore costumes with a touch of the monastery, and religious imagery appeared in unlikely places. The corridors were dark, the mood faintly scandalous. It was a clever idea, though perhaps one that expected guests to spend rather too much time admiring the cleverness.

When Experimental Group bought the hotel in October 2024, it did something unusual. Instead of bringing in a new designer to erase the past, it invited Auer back to edit himself. The hotel reopened as Experimental Marais in March 2025. The arches survived, the stained glass stayed, and very little was demolished. Auer, given a rare second chance, had decided not to start again. He simply changed the mood.

The most convincing result is Temple & Chapon, the restaurant beneath the glass roof. The setting still has the proportions of a secular cathedral, but the tables are now dressed for a rather more worldly congregation. Chandeliers glow above leather seats and white linen, and Mélanie Serre's kitchen takes its inspiration from a 1950s New York chophouse. There are oysters Rockefeller, crab cakes, generous cuts of beef and things to share. The room is handsome enough to admire, but a good dinner soon takes precedence over the architecture. That is progress.

Experimental began life as a cocktail bar, and has not forgotten its original profession. At the American Bar, the bartenders borrow from the great bars of New York, including Please Don't Tell's Benton’s Old Fashioned, made with bourbon washed in bacon fat, maple syrup and bitters. It is an improbable drink to find beneath stained glass in the Marais. It is also rather delicious. The hotel's former enthusiasm for sin has become a healthy interest in appetite.

Upstairs, the revision has been gentler. Most of the forty-three rooms were already attractive, with warm wood, handsome beds and carefully chosen art, and Auer has wisely left much of them alone. The imagined traveller who inspired the original decoration still seems to have abandoned a few possessions on the shelves. The Classic Baldaquin Rooms are just twenty-one square metres, with queen beds and showers; Superior Rooms offer twenty-four and look into the courtyard. A Deluxe is a more comfortable thirty-five square metres, though a bathtub is not guaranteed. For a genuinely generous stay, the forty-one-square-metre Executive Rooms face the courtyard, while the fifty-eight-square-metre top-floor Suite has a bathtub and its own hammam shower. Here, at least, the decision is easier than the hotel's architectural philosophy: pay for space if you intend to spend time upstairs.

The spa occupies the first floor, with a hammam and a Roman bath that is better for soaking than swimming. Susanne Kaufmann treatments offer an agreeable antidote to the cocktails, although the two facilities may not entirely cancel each other out. Outside, the Haut Marais has galleries, independent shops, cafés and the Musée des Arts et Métiers within walking distance. Rue du Temple itself is busy rather than picturesque, and the public rooms attract Parisians as well as guests. This is not a hushed little house to retreat to after eight in the evening.

Nor has every problem been solved. The smaller bedrooms remain small, the design still favours theatrical shadows over daylight, and the room rates are firmly five-star. Anyone who wants an enormous lobby, a proper swimming pool or a hotel that makes no demands on the senses might find the whole enterprise rather exhausting.

But Experimental Marais has acquired something more valuable than another decorative flourish: the confidence to let its guests enjoy themselves without instructions. The original Sinner wanted you to notice the room. These days, the room is quite happy if you forget about it halfway through dinner.