Hotel Hana

The fan in Camille Monet's hand is French. In his 1876 painting La Japonaise, she wears a magnificent scarlet kimono and stands against a wall of Japanese fans, but the one she holds is red, white and blue. She is also wearing a blonde wig. Even when Paris was dreaming of Japan, it couldn't resist putting a little of itself in the picture.

Hotel Hana, which opened near the Opéra in 2024, would have understood the joke. A few streets away, rue Sainte-Anne has become the heart of Paris's Japanese quarter, with ramen shops, grocers and restaurants serving a city that has made Japanese food part of its everyday life. Hana offers something rather different. Laura Gonzalez and Olivier Leone have imagined a meeting between the Japanese taste for restraint and the French appetite for decoration. The French, inevitably, have brought more luggage.

There are just twenty-six rooms in this former office building, but apparently no shortage of fabric. Straw-textured walls meet polished lacquer, floral upholstery and velvet; dark wood gives the rooms a lovely warmth, while the marble bathrooms add a certain Parisian conviction that nothing should be too modest. Lamps glow beneath delicate shades, and the furniture has the curious quality of seeming both old and newly invented. It is a world away from a Japanese ryokan. Nobody here is pretending otherwise.

The rooms are small, sometimes very small. A Classic is eighteen square metres, and even a Deluxe offers only twenty-five. For a longer stay, the thirty-two-square-metre Prestige rooms are a better proposition, particularly the versions with balconies overlooking rue du Quatre-Septembre and the Bourse district. Oddly, the Suite is smaller at twenty-seven square metres, though it adds a sitting area and a marble bathtub. On the seventh floor, the forty-six-square-metre Apartment has two bedrooms and a view towards Sacré-Cœur. Room names are worth reading carefully: at Hana, the most expensive-sounding category is not necessarily the largest.

Downstairs, Hanabi takes the whole French-Japanese conversation into the kitchen and makes it considerably more entertaining. Breakfast can be croissants from a Paris bakery or ochazuke, rice in a broth of tea and dashi with salmon and mushrooms. Later, French coastal fish becomes chirashi, udon acquires a new accent, and a tiramisu tastes of roasted green tea. The menu, devised by Shirley Garrier, has the cheerful confidence of people who see no reason to leave a good idea alone simply because another country thought of it first. At the bar, Japanese gin and sansho-infused vermouth make a Dry Martini that would probably puzzle Monet more than the decoration.

There is another little surprise below ground: a heated pool where a counter-current jet lets you swim without going anywhere. The space is small and rather cocoon-like, with two treatment rooms offering Japanese-inspired treatments, including kobido facial massage. Hotel guests can use the pool, but it is not a private bath reserved exclusively for you. Nor is this a hotel built for spreading out. The little gym, compact bedrooms and busy office street outside are reminders that the space and quiet of a country retreat are not part of the bargain. Some guests have also reported faint métro vibrations.

The pleasures are in the mixture. You can eat Japanese food around rue Sainte-Anne without ever thinking of it as exotic, then come home to a Parisian room full of lacquer, silk and flowers. Hana is not a substitute for a journey to Japan. It is what happens when two cultures have a long conversation and occasionally interrupt one another. After dinner, order that Japanese-gin martini. There is no need to decide which country it belongs to.