Commissioned by the Boucicaut family — founders of Le Bon Marché, the world's first department store — and completed in 1910 to designs by architects Louis-Charles Boileau and Henri Tauzin, the building at the corner of Boulevard Raspail and Rue de Sèvres has always been a statement about what the Left Bank expects of itself. After a four-year restoration completed in 2018, it reopened as the Mandarin Oriental Lutetia, carrying 184 rooms and suites across seven floors of flamboyant Art Nouveau stonework — the sculpted limestone facade, with its bowed balconies and domed corner pavilion, left exactly as Haussmann's Paris intended such buildings to age. The interiors, directed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, resolve a genuine tension between the building's ornamental past and a contemporary Parisian restraint. Guest rooms employ vertical-ribbed oak panelling as headboard walls, herringbone parquet underfoot, and onyx ceiling medallions that glow amber at dusk — warm without sentimentality. The bar preserves its original vaulted ceiling with faded painted cartouches intact, a dark sculpted bronze counter positioned beneath the plasterwork as a deliberate counterpoint rather than a restoration exercise. Most arresting is the brasserie, where a vast stained-glass ceiling commissioned from artist Yan Pei-Ming floods the room in saturated colour, its figurative exuberance set against ivory carved walls — the building's century-old bones in direct conversation with the present.

No travel notes provided yet.

No description provided yet.