Villa-des-Prés

Rue de Buci is a peculiar place to look for a country house. By morning the food shops are open, the café tables are filling and the pavements belong to people who have decided that walking in a straight line is overrated. Yet at number 29, behind a handsome façade with bow windows and wrought-iron balconies, Villa-des-Prés offers a different rhythm. You can watch the bustle, go downstairs for coffee, or simply shut the window. The quiet, it turns out, was engineered.

During the conversion of this 1911 apartment building, the upper floors were isolated from the street and métro vibrations using structural supports designed to absorb movement. It is a wonderfully practical detail in a hotel that otherwise looks as though it has been assembled from the possessions of a cultured Parisian friend. The building reopened as a hotel in late 2023, with just thirty-four rooms and suites. Interior designer Bruno Borrione gave it warm timber, leather, parquet floors and furniture you would actually want in your own flat. There is a bar rather than a ballroom, and a small planted patio rather than a garden. This is a villa in attitude, not acreage.

The name is an old Parisian joke. Saint-Germain-des-Prés was once surrounded by meadows, including the Pré-aux-Clercs where university students went to idle, argue and occasionally duel. Almost nothing green survives of that landscape. What the neighbourhood has in its place is a wonderful excess of bookshops, galleries, food shops and cafés. The hotel puts you directly among them, which is more useful than a romantic story about grass.

Upstairs, the rooms look lived in without looking untidy. Original paintings were commissioned from eleven artists through the gallerist Amélie du Chalard, rather than bought by the dozen to match the wallpaper. They sit among old-fashioned mouldings and modern furniture; the mosaic bathrooms are unexpectedly bold, some with deep red lacquer overhead. But the room categories matter more than the decoration. A Superior offers twenty-two to twenty-four square metres and faces rue de Buci. The twenty-six-square-metre Deluxe overlooks the inner patio, a different prospect for anyone who prefers to wake without watching the street. A Junior Suite is twenty-eight to thirty square metres; the thirty-five-square-metre Suite adds a sitting area and both bath and shower.

Go higher and the choice becomes more extravagant. A forty-two-square-metre Prestige Suite may have a balcony, or a bow window instead, so ask which you are getting. The two top-floor apartments measure sixty-five square metres apiece, with proper living and dining space and private terraces overlooking Paris. From up there you can pick out the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Cœur. Lovely, certainly, but these are not views that come with every expensive room downstairs.

The surprise is below ground. There is a thirteen-metre indoor pool with a half-moon sauna alongside it, and a gym nearby. The pool is long enough for a few proper strokes, though it is shared with the other guests, not a private bath that happens to be enormous. After a day of walking the Left Bank, it is a much better reason to stay in than the minibar. Upstairs, the bar serves coffee, cocktails and champagne, and in good weather you can take your drink into the little patio. There is no full restaurant, but on rue de Buci you could eat somewhere different every night without crossing a major road.

The compromise is the same one that makes the address so appealing. You are paying five-star prices to live in one of the busiest pieces of Saint-Germain, not to escape to the countryside. A street-facing room may offer the atmosphere you want, and the hotel's soundproofing helps, but the neighbourhood will not turn into a village at bedtime. Nor should you expect vast public rooms in a house of thirty-four keys. What you get instead is the pleasure of stepping into Paris whenever you like, and having somewhere genuinely comfortable to retreat to when you have had enough. The meadows are gone. It turns out the streets have their uses.