Hôtel de Sers

The Marquis de Sers has been dead for more than a century, but he and his family are still difficult to evict. His carriage entrance survives, so does the marble staircase, and along a gallery twenty-two metres long the family portraits hang where nobody can miss them. You can replace the furniture in a house like this. The ancestors are harder to move.

The mansion was built for him in 1880 and became a hotel in the 1930s. It now belongs to a family hotel group run by Anne and Agathe Jousse, a mother and daughter who are no relation of the marquis. They inherited the dilemma, not the title. Keep everything and you have a museum; change everything and you might as well have bought another house. Working with interior architect Pascal Allaman on the renovation completed in 2025, they found a more amusing arrangement.

You still enter where the carriages stopped, and the marble staircase still leads towards the marquis's former reception salon. But among the solemn family faces, Géraldine Prieur's graphic rugs announce that somebody else has the keys now. The ancestors look faintly startled, like relatives who went out for lunch and returned to find the furniture rearranged. They needn't worry. The walls are still theirs; the living have merely claimed the floor.

Upstairs, the family gives way to imaginary tenants: the occupants of a Paris apartment in the 1930s, with pale parquet, dark wood and the occasional daring fabric. There is enough atmosphere without turning every bedroom into a period set. Across the fifty-two rooms and suites, though, grandeur is not evenly shared. The smaller rooms are comfortable but hardly the size of a marquis's drawing room, and an Eiffel Tower view belongs to particular suites rather than to the address itself. At the top is a Marquis Apartment. The old owner may have lost the house, but he has kept a rather good room name.

The loveliest place to linger is neither grand nor new. Beyond the restaurant is a courtyard of citrus trees beneath a glass roof, where lunch can stretch until the expensive streets outside begin to feel rather unnecessary. It is easy to imagine this as the family conservatory, except that the family has long since gone and the restaurant welcomes people who are not staying at the hotel. A house once built for receiving still receives. It simply no longer asks anyone to be presented to the marquis.

There are limits to this domestic idea of luxury. This is a polished stretch of the eighth arrondissement, not a quarter of unexpected little discoveries, and the house does not try to be a palace with a day's entertainment under one roof. It is better at giving you somewhere to return to than at persuading you never to leave. That seems a sensible choice for a Paris address.

A good heir knows that keeping a house alive is not the same as keeping it unchanged. The marquis can have his portraits and his staircase. The living get the rest of the house.