Maison Albar Le Pont-Neuf

At the bottom of rue du Pont-Neuf stands the oldest bridge in Paris, and it is called the New Bridge. It was new in 1607 and has kept the name ever since, which is the kind of joke Paris likes best: one that takes four centuries to land.

Halfway up the same street is a hotel that tells the joke the other way round. From the pavement, Maison Albar Le Pont-Neuf looks every inch the old quarter: a stone façade of 1866, iron balconies, the steady face of Haussmann’s Paris. The building once housed the offices of the fashion house Céline. Behind that nineteenth-century front, Alexandre Danan and Atelier COS have made a thoroughly contemporary hotel. The old face now fronts rooms made for another century.

Danan took his cue from the strangest fortnight in the bridge’s history. In September 1985 Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Pont-Neuf in sandstone-coloured fabric, and some three million people came to look at a bridge they might otherwise have crossed without a second glance. Covered up, it was suddenly visible. Inside the hotel the same softness has been put to quieter use. Sheer curtains veil the windows, wood and leather are bent into curves, the colours are pale and powdery, and whatever light comes in from the street has been filtered on the way.

That matters more than it might seem, because this is not a soft part of Paris. Rue du Pont-Neuf climbs from the river to Les Halles, the old market quarter, where a great glass canopy now stands above one of the busiest transport hubs in the city. Crowds, shoppers and traffic work their way up and down the street all day. The hotel softens what happens outside rather than pretending it has gone away, and it keeps its gentlest light for the very bottom of the house, where a swimming pool catches daylight from a well above.

The best way to use it is to unwrap the city a little at a time. In the morning, walk down the street, past the Samaritaine and onto the bridge, and within a few minutes you are standing above the tip of the Île de la Cité, with the Seine dividing on either side. In the evening, come back to the pale rooms. The wide view over Parisian rooftops belongs to The Rooftop, at the top of the house, not to the rooms below it. Downstairs, the restaurant is called Odette, after the grandmother of Céline Falco, one of the hotel’s founders: a small domestic welcome in the middle of a very public city.

Not everything can be wrapped away. The smallest rooms are around twenty-two square metres, and some look straight onto rue du Pont-Neuf. The street remains busy, however soft the curtains. Old Paris also stops at the front door. The interiors belong firmly to the present, and the hotel borrows the city’s history without attempting to recreate it.

Down the street, a bridge has been called new for more than four hundred years. Up the street, a new house wears an old face. Most of the pleasure of staying here lies in the short walk between the two.