Saint James Paris

In 1892 the widow of Adolphe Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, gave Paris a building to house young scholars: the Fondation Thiers, a neo-classical mansion in its own grounds on avenue Bugeaud, in the 16th arrondissement. The field it stood on had been the city's first balloon launch site, where Henry Giffard's aerostats took off in the 1870s. That mansion is now the Saint James Paris, and the balloon story survives in the striped tents of its garden.

History

Mme Thiers' foundation lodged and paid a handful of pensionnaires each year, chosen among the best young graduates of the universities, who lived and worked in the house for three years. The Fondation Thiers continued in the building until the 1980s, when it moved out and the mansion was sold. It reopened in 1991 as the Saint James Club, modelled on the London clubs of the same name, with a membership and a few dozen rooms for non-members.

The hotel has belonged since the 2000s to the Bertrand family, and the house took its present form in two stages. In 2011 the decorator Bambi Sloan redid it in a deliberately theatrical manner, with tartan, striped wallpapers and a hot-air balloon theme in the garden. In 2021, after a closure of eighteen months, Laura Gonzalez replaced that scheme with a warmer one, and the restaurant and spa were rebuilt.

Architecture and design

The mansion is a free-standing building with a double staircase at the entrance and a courtyard in front, surrounded by its own walled garden, which is why the house calls itself the only château-hotel in Paris. The grand staircase rises under a glass roof. Gonzalez's interiors use carved wood, patterned textiles, lacquer and hand-painted panels, with a different palette on each floor. The former library of the foundation remains the heart of the house: a two-level room lined with the scholars' books, which serves as the bar for residents and members in the evening.

In the garden, cabins striped like balloon envelopes house tables for lunch in summer, a reference to the aerodrome that occupied the site.

Rooms and suites

There are 50 rooms and suites across four floors, several of them duplexes under the roof and a few with private terraces or a view over the garden. Each floor follows its own colour scheme from the 2021 scheme. The largest suites face the courtyard front and have separate sitting rooms.

Dining

Bellefeuille, the restaurant that opened with the 2021 reopening, has held a Michelin star since 2022 under chef Julien Dumas, formerly of Lucas Carton. The menu draws on the hotel's own kitchen garden in the Yvelines and on fish from Brittany. In summer the restaurant moves into the garden under the striped cabins. The library bar serves cocktails and a short menu to residents and members.

Wellness

The spa is run by Guerlain, the Paris perfume house, with treatment rooms, a hammam, a sauna and a small indoor pool in the basement, rebuilt in 2021. A fitness room completes it.

Weddings and events

The Saint James keeps a members' club alongside the hotel, so its salons are busy through the week with lunches and private dinners. For events, the library, the ground-floor salons and the garden are the main spaces: cocktails of a hundred or more in the garden in summer, seated dinners in the salons, board meetings in the smaller rooms. Weddings use the courtyard for the arrival, the garden for the reception and the restaurant for the dinner.

Location

Avenue Bugeaud runs between the Place Victor-Hugo and the avenue Foch in the residential 16th, a quarter of embassies and private schools. The Arc de Triomphe is about fifteen minutes on foot, the Bois de Boulogne ten. Victor Hugo metro station on line 2 is the nearest, with Porte Dauphine and the RER C at Avenue Foch close by. Charles de Gaulle airport is about 40 minutes by car by the périphérique. The garden sets it apart from every other luxury hotel in Paris: there is no other address in the city where a guest can breakfast on a lawn behind its own wall.