Hôtel Costes

Nobody at Hôtel Costes will tell you how many stars it has, because it never asked for any. The Paris hotel the Costes brothers opened in 1995 on rue Saint-Honoré, a few doors from place Vendôme, set out to be a restaurant and a bar with rooms above, and it has stayed closer to that idea than to the grand-hotel model of its neighbours.

History

Jean-Louis and Gilbert Costes came from the Aveyron, the region that sent generations of café owners to Paris. They made their name with Café Costes at Les Halles in 1984, designed by Philippe Starck, which brought designer cafés to the city, then with Café Marly in the Louvre in 1994, their first project with Jacques Garcia. Hôtel Costes followed in 1995 in a former hotel on rue Saint-Honoré, and Garcia's interiors there launched a decorating style that was copied worldwide for the next fifteen years.

In 1999 the resident DJ Stéphane Pompougnac released the first Hôtel Costes compilation. The series ran to fifteen volumes and sold in the millions, so that for many people abroad the hotel was a sound before it was a building. The hotel closed for a long period of works and expansion into neighbouring buildings towards rue de Castiglione, reopening in the early 2020s with a larger footprint and a spa.

Architecture and design

Garcia's scheme is Second Empire taken to excess: crimson velvet, fringed lampshades, dark panelling, gilt mirrors, low light and a courtyard in the Italianate manner, arcaded and planted, that functions as the hotel's main room in summer. The idea was that a hotel could be as atmospheric as a theatre set, and the influence was immediate on bars and hotels in London, New York and Moscow. The expansion kept the style while the later interiors moved towards a lighter palette.

Rooms and suites

The rooms follow the Garcia register, with heavy fabrics, dark wood and marble bathrooms, and the hotel does not publish a room count or categories in the way the Palaces do. The expansion added larger rooms and suites.

Dining

The restaurant and the courtyard are the reason most people come. Service runs late and the menu is simple French brasserie cooking, deliberately unchanged across decades: the restaurant's reputation rests on the crowd and the setting, not the kitchen. The bar is the hotel's other engine, with the house music that gave rise to the compilations. During the Paris fashion weeks the courtyard tables are the most sought-after in the city.

Wellness

The hotel has a spa with an indoor pool and a fitness room, long a rarity for a hotel of this type in the quarter.

Weddings and events

Hôtel Costes is used for fashion-house dinners and launch parties rather than conventional meetings or weddings; it does not operate a conference business, and private events are arranged case by case with the hotel.

Location

Rue Saint-Honoré between place Vendôme and the Tuileries, with the Louvre ten minutes on foot and the couture houses of the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré further west. Place Vendôme itself, with the Ritz on its western side, is two hundred metres east along the street, and the Tuileries gate on rue de Rivoli is a block south. Métro Tuileries and Concorde are the nearest stations; Paris-Charles de Gaulle is the nearest major airport. Among luxury hotels in Paris it is the one that behaves least like a hotel.