7.8Avenue Junot, Paris
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On a private passage between avenue Junot and rue Lepic stands a rock with a reputation. The neighbours call it the witch's rock. Once, according to Montmartre legend, the passage was called la Sourcière, after the spring that fed an old fountain. Then the local children changed a letter and gave the story a frightening old woman who lived alone behind the gates. Nobody can prove she existed. The gates certainly do. In 2009 they were closed to the public, to the anger of neighbours who had used the passage as a shortcut for years.
One door here opens onto an altogether more inviting mystery. The Hôtel Particulier Montmartre cannot be seen from the street. Beyond the gate, a garden opens around a pale, Directoire-style house. Louis Benech laid out the grounds, some nine hundred square metres of trees, paths and places to sit. Montmartre has plenty of famous views. Here the luxury is different: enough green to forget, for an afternoon, that you are on the hill at all.
The house once belonged to the Guerrand-Hermès family before the Comtets made it a hotel, and Oscar Comtet runs it now. The garden is treated as its most important room, which matters more than any promise of exclusivity. It has birds in the trees, shade that moves as the day passes and the slightly untidy life that comes from being cared for rather than staged.
There are five suites and no ordinary bedrooms. Redesigned by Pierre Lacroix, they have a spirited collection of identities, far from the uniform calm of a conventional luxury hotel. One is called Grand Tralala, which tells you the tone. At the top of the house, Les Folies du Ciel is an eighty-five-square-metre loft reached by a winding staircase, with a freestanding bath in the middle of the room and a glass roof that frames the Paris rooftops. These are not interchangeable places to sleep, so choose the one you actually want.
The trouble with a good secret is that people talk. The restaurant serves visitors as well as residents, and since 2015 Le Très Particulier, all red velvet armchairs, jungle wallpaper and a glass-walled winter garden, has drawn Parisians through the gate for cocktails. In fine weather the garden becomes an outdoor dining room. Guests in five suites will not have the grounds to themselves, though in a place this removed from the city the result can be wonderfully sociable.
The house makes no claim to be a palace. There is no pool or spa, and anyone who expects the smooth machinery of a grand hotel may find the house a little informal. The climb to and from the rest of Montmartre remains real, however secluded the room feels once you arrive.
The old passage was once a way through the neighbourhood. Now most people have to stop at its gate. That is a strange fate for a shortcut, but an agreeable beginning to a stay. The children who invented the witch were sure something extraordinary lay behind the wall. They were wrong about the woman. They were right about the garden.
Pavillon D
A hotel with a pavilion letter for an address.
In Louis Benech's plan the house sits inside the garden rather than at the end of it, so the building reads as one more object among the trees. From the gate a paved path runs to the door between the trees, so the first sight of the house is framed by leaves rather than by a forecourt. The garden is also listed, a protection that gives it a permanence the interiors do not have: the suites have already been redecorated once, the garden keeps its shape.
One of the four Deluxe Suites and one of the two smaller ones, it is the suite that carries the garden indoors. Green and white dominate, foliage is painted across walls and ceiling, and the windows open towards the trees. At 35 m² it gives up the open-plan bathroom of the larger suites for one that looks over the gardens. For a first stay it is the suite that explains the house most simply: the green outside, repeated within.
Le Très Particulier opened in 2015 and set the tone the rest of the house later followed: red velvet armchairs, jungle wallpaper, a gilded ceiling and a piano against the wall. It is the room where the hotel stops being private. Parisians who have never slept here come through the gate for a cocktail, and residents share the room with them on equal terms. Its mood, more theatre than hotel bar, explains the suites upstairs better than any brochure.
When the garden is too cold to sit in, the winter garden of Le Très Particulier is where the house keeps its green. The glass roof and the indoor planting carry the view from outside into the room, and the chequered floor makes it feel like a stage set between two curtains. Unlike the suites, this is shared ground: residents and Parisians come through the same gate, and the room belongs to both.
At a glance
Where
23 avenue Junot, Pavillon D, 75018 Paris, on a private passage between avenue Junot and rue Lepic; Lamarck-Caulaincourt (line 12) about five minutes' walk, Abbesses (line 12) about eight, Blanche (line 2) about twelve
Why this one
About 900 m² by Louis Benech.
From 35 m² to an 85 m² loft.
A private passage off avenue Junot.
The Edit Notes
The four Deluxe Suites split neatly in two. Danse Pacifique and Lazy Leopardesses, at 45 m², have open-plan bathrooms within the room. Grand Tralala and Jardin sur le Nil, at 35 m², give up ten square metres but keep bathrooms that look over the gardens. In a house whose whole argument is its green, the smaller pair is the better choice; the open bathrooms suit only couples who want no doors at all.
Pierre Lacroix did not arrive here as a hotel decorator. His first work for the house, in 2015, was the decor of Le Très Particulier, a cocktail bar conceived by Oscar Comtet. By 2020 he had reworked the ground floor, joining small rooms into one open space, and the suites followed under his direction. Their theatrical streak makes more sense once it is read as a bar's taste carried upstairs, not a hotel brief.
The hotel names two métro stations, Lamarck-Caulaincourt and Blanche, and from either the final approach is a climb on foot. Avenue Junot runs across the upper slope of the hill, which is why the garden feels so removed from the city, and also why every return from central Paris ends uphill. Light luggage helps. Anyone who dislikes gradients should plan on a taxi to the gate rather than the métro at the end of a long day.
Meals move into the garden only when the weather allows. In the cold months the life of the house goes indoors, to the salons and the bar, and the grounds become something to look at rather than to live in. The suites stay as distinctive in January as in June; the main room does not. For a first stay, when the garden is the reason to come, choose the warm months and keep winter for a return.
The price question
The money buys a suite with a real personality and a listed garden of a size few Paris hotels can offer, in a house that cannot be seen from the street. It does not buy the grounds to yourself, the services of a large hotel or a central address. It is worth it for a stay in the warm months, in a suite chosen deliberately; less so for anyone who wants a spa, a pool or the Louvre on foot.
Book it for a couple's stay in spring or summer, in a suite chosen for its bathroom and its outlook. Look elsewhere for a full-service hotel, a spa or a base for sightseeing on foot.
Maison Souquet
At 10 rue de Bruxelles near the Moulin Rouge: twenty rooms and suites in a house that opened in 1905 as a pleasure house, with a spa.
Terrass'' Hôtel
On rue Joseph-de-Maistre in Montmartre: a hotel built in 1911, with a seventh-floor restaurant and a rooftop bar over Paris.
The Extra Edit
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How the grade is made
The Edit score is the editor's grade for the level of the hotel, out of ten. It weighs what the outside judges say (Michelin Keys, Forbes Travel Guide, World's 50 Best Hotels, Atout France palace status, La Liste), what changed in the last two years and what guests write now; where these and the editor's own judgement disagree, the editor decides. A spa with a pool worth booking for adds up to two tenths.
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