Marquis Faubourg Saint-Honoré

It wasn’t all that long ago that we found ourselves continually using these pages to call for a modern boutique-style revolution in the Parisian hotel scene. Well, we certainly aren’t about to claim the credit, but the revolution, it’s safe to say, has taken place. Paris is full of design statements of all shapes and sizes — but few, it must be said, feel quite as tailor-made, quite so subtly adapted to their historical surroundings, as the Marquis Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

That’s down to two things: one, the historical surroundings themselves, in this case an 18th-century courtyard townhouse, and two, the designer, Michele Bönan, who’s something of an architectural Method actor, able to subsume his personal style into the work at hand. The result is that the Marquis feels less like a design statement and more like a stunningly luxe, historically aware yet stylishly contemporary mansion-hotel — which is rather the point.

They’re all suites, as you’d expect — there’s no such thing as a twin room in a proper mansion. Interiors are warm and elegant, spaces ample, and the bathrooms are Carrara marble, proof that sometimes the old ways are the best ways. There’s a private gym and an arrangement with a neighboring spa for in-room treatments, and the private lounge, Le Gilbert, serves breakfast in the morning and drinks and light meals all day and evening.

A big-splash palace hotel it’s not, and neither is it an eccentric, aggressively avant-garde design hotel. Instead the Marquis is, above all else, discreet — what goes on within its walls tends to stay there.