Brach

Interested observers of the boutique-hotel world have witnessed several evolutions of Philippe Starck’s hospitality-design career, and Brach Paris finds him in yet another mood — this hotel, in Paris’s 16th, makes an unlikely sort of glamour from the materials of the 1970s, to suit the building’s vintage. This means glossy wood paneling, leather, metal, vibrant patterns in earthy colors, and mirrors more or less everywhere.

Rooms, as you’d expect from Starck, are full of unexpected visual details, but their thoroughgoing luxury — marble basins, soaking tubs, automated blackout shades — make them feel eclectic rather than prankish. And the suites are particularly lavish, featuring terraces with 180° views of Paris, some of them facing the Eiffel Tower. In Starck’s hands whimsy and high luxury go hand in hand, which makes for a memorable stay, to say the very least.

The building, a former postal sorting facility, has a surplus of underground space, which Brach Paris has filled with health and wellness spaces, including exercise machines, a 23-meter pool, a massive hot tub, and classes like boxing and “Abdo Express“.

On the ground floor you’ll find Restaurant Brach, an open-kitchen small-plates Mediterranean restaurant with communal seating. A pastry shop and a barber shop round out the public spaces, and there’s also a rooftop, with a small lounge for events and a functioning kitchen garden, growing ingredients — and raising chickens — for the restaurant. How many hotels in Paris can say the same?