Hôtel Splendide Royal Paris

In 1924 a two-year-old boy called Pietro Cardin arrived in Saint-Étienne with his family from a village near Treviso. France made a Pierre of him. Paris made him famous, then let him put his name on almost anything that could carry a label. He collected buildings, too, and one of them was a mansion on the rue du Cirque. It is a curious fate for a man who dressed the future that his former property should have ended up so fond of the past.

The house was built in 1897 and opened as the Hôtel Splendide Royal in 2016, when the Italian hotelier Roberto Naldi added Paris to a collection that already included Rome and Lugano. There are just twelve suites. From the street it is impeccably French: an emerald-green façade and a doorway that could belong to any private house in the 8th. Inside, pale panelling and gilded mirrors suggest that the future, if it ever came calling, was politely shown out again. Cardin's space-age fashions are nowhere in evidence.

Italy shows less in the decoration than in the scale. With so few rooms, the person who welcomes you can be called a maître de maison without seeming to have mistaken the hotel for a château. When the Splendide opened, guests were even encouraged to address the staff by their first names. In a house once owned by a man who made his surname famous, that is a particularly pleasing reversal. The Naldis have not put Pietro's name on the door. They have simply made the place less concerned with titles.

Upstairs, the suites resemble the apartments of well-behaved Parisian relatives: comfortable places to sit, classical furniture made by Italian craftsmen, and not much danger of being surprised by a chair. Even the smallest junior suites start at thirty-five square metres, with enough room to sit somewhere other than the bed. Some of the more theatrical hotels nearby have far more to show you. Here the interesting thing is how little the house feels obliged to perform.

The restaurant has the better claim to the Italian side of the family. Tosca takes its name from Puccini's opera, though before the music was written La Tosca was a French play, first staged in Paris. Its story was set in Rome; Italy supplied the score. Now a Roman chef, Paolo Ambrogio, cooks Italian food in the same Paris house. A French beginning, an Italian second act and dinner at the end: it is an unusually neat story for a restaurant to have stumbled into.

A house this small cannot do everything. Beyond Tosca, there is none of the procession of public rooms that makes a Paris palace a destination in itself. But on rue du Cirque, that seems less a deficit than the point: the Faubourg Saint-Honoré at one end of the street, the quiet of avenue Gabriel at the other, and an address that is content to be a home rather than a spectacle.

Pierre Cardin spent a lifetime turning Pietro into Pierre. On rue du Cirque, the house he once owned has made the return journey, without needing another label.