Relais Christine

The door at 3 rue Christine opens onto a covered passage, and the passage onto a paved courtyard, with ivy on the walls and swings hanging in it. Just inside are the lounges, with fireplaces and an honour bar, open at every hour; breakfast is laid out there until eleven, or brought upstairs whenever it is wanted. With forty-eight rooms, a third as many as the Ritz, the Relais Christine is a small and quiet house, and these shared rooms do much of its work.

They have to, because there is no restaurant. It is a compromise, and a well-managed one. The hotel has a menu of its own for the lounges and for room service, which runs through the night, and at lunch and dinner it also offers the menus of its two neighbours on the street: an inventive kitchen next door at number 1, where a young chef cooks with ferments and smoke, and a bistro at number 9 that serves marrow bones and côte de bœuf. Beyond them lies Saint-Germain. Over a stay of several days the house becomes a base for eating out, and the concierge, the part of the staff recent guests praise most, is where the tables come from.

The rooms are the compromise the house cannot manage away. They run from 19 square metres to 25, and recent guests, contented ones included, describe them as small, with little room for luggage. In most categories the side a room faces is a matter of request, and it changes the stay. On the street, the windows look across a quiet lane at a small cinema that shows Hollywood classics; on the courtyard, they look into the ivy, and courtyard rooms are the ones recent guests recommend. For more than a night or two, the suites, 40 to 56 square metres with two bathrooms and a sitting room, face one or the other. At these prices, a week in a 19-square-metre room is a poor use of the money.

The garden is another matter, and most guests will see it, if at all, from a window. It lies behind the house, about 150 square metres of planting that supplies the honey at breakfast, and it is closed: four rooms have a terrace onto it, two of them the Garden Suites. The smallest rooms, the 19-square-metre Cosy category, are the ones sold on the garden side; the largest suites never face it. For a guest who wants both the flowers and the floor space there is one sure answer, a Garden Suite of 40 square metres with its own terrace, and the house has only two.