Maison Souquet

Two red lanterns and no sign mark the door of 10 rue de Bruxelles, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris at the foot of Montmartre. Maison Souquet, the twenty-room hotel behind it, was conceived by the designer Jacques Garcia as a Belle Époque maison close reborn, and everything inside, down to the names on the doors, follows that script. The red lantern was the sign by which such houses were once known, and the hotel keeps it as its only announcement to the street.

History

The streets between place Blanche and place de Clichy were the pleasure district of Paris around 1900, when the Moulin Rouge on boulevard de Clichy had been open since 1889 and the discreet houses of the surrounding streets served the same clientele until the law of 1946 closed them. The hotel's conceit is that the building was one of them, the house of a Madame Souquet; the atmosphere is reconstructed rather than preserved, and the story is told as a story. Émile Zola lived and died a few doors along, at 21 bis rue de Bruxelles, in 1902. The hotel opened in 2015 as part of Maisons Particulières, a small Paris group that commissioned Garcia again for Maison Proust in the Marais, opened in 2022.

Architecture and design

Garcia, whose work includes the Hôtel Costes on rue Saint-Honoré and the restoration of La Mamounia in Marrakech, built the interior around the Napoleon III taste for excess: wall silks, fringed velvet, layered patterns, bronze lamps, and lighting kept low by day as well as by night. A sequence of small salons runs back from the entrance, one of them in the Moorish manner the period favoured for smoking rooms, and they serve as bar, breakfast room and drawing room for the guests. There is no public restaurant, and the salons are reserved for the people staying in the house.

Rooms and suites

The twenty rooms and suites each carry the name of a courtesan of the demi-monde: La Païva, whose own hôtel still stands on the Champs-Élysées, Liane de Pougy, Cléo de Mérode, La Belle Otero among them. No two are alike. The schemes vary room by room, Second Empire in one, Japanese in another, Orientalist in a third, with canopied beds, mirrored walls and bathrooms in marble and mosaic. The largest rooms, on the upper floors, are suites with a separate sitting room.

Wellness

Below ground is a small spa that guests book for private use rather than share: a pool under a painted ceiling, a hammam and a treatment room, taken by the hour for one couple at a time. It is the only facility of its kind in the house and the one most guests mention.

Location

Rue de Bruxelles runs between rue de Clichy and place Blanche, in the quarter the nineteenth century called the Nouvelle Athènes, where Chopin, George Sand and Delacroix lived; the Musée de la Vie romantique on rue Chaptal keeps that memory a few streets to the south. The Moulin Rouge is a short walk east along boulevard de Clichy, and the climb to Sacré-Cœur begins beyond it. Blanche on line 2 and Place de Clichy on lines 2 and 13 are the nearest métro stations. Gare Saint-Lazare is about a kilometre south. Charles de Gaulle airport is around 30 kilometres to the north-east and Orly around 20 kilometres to the south, so the hotel is a luxury hotel in Paris for people who want Montmartre rather than the Right Bank's grand hotels at their door.