Rooms designed by Maison Martin Margiela, a location in the heart of Paris’s Golden Triangle, and a touch of traditional French elegance; it’s hard not to become enamoured with La Maison Champs Élysées.
The hotel, which sits between Avenue Montaigne and the Grand Palais, blends elegant, chic style with imaginative – almost theatrical – design. Its rooms are simple, clean and contemporary, offering a relaxing oasis in the city, but the real pull is its Couture Collection; the 17 rooms and suites designed by Maison Martin Margiela.
Taking its distinctive design aesthetic and applying it to interiors, the fashion house uses visual trickery and avant-garde style to create luxury rooms that aren’t quite what they seem. Take the ‘Lost Mouldings Suite’, for example, with almost-clinical white rooms where its wall mouldings start and finish at random; the ‘Gilded Lounge Suite’, where the ornamental richness of the Napoleon III style is reproduced in trompe-l’œil fashion on the walls; or the ‘Curiosity Case Suite’, where walls and parquet floors are black and moody, and a curiosities case full of contemporary objects dominates one of the walls.
The various bars and restaurants offer this same innovative, almost surreal, take on décor – think oversized mouldings and false doors – while serving up equally as good-looking (and tasting) food. Don’t miss the terrace and relaxing garden outside when the weather warms up.
For more information, visit the La Maison Champs Élysées website.
Words by Angharad Jones. Images property of La Maison Champs Élysées.