The Marais, Four Centuries of Elegance

Let's be honest: when we first visited the apartment on the rue Saint-Antoine, we barely looked at the interior. We stood at the window, gazing at the Église Saint-Paul. That's the trouble with the Marais: it distracts you. So before we share our addresses, let us tell you why this neighborhood still has that effect on us, four hundred years after everyone else.

It all begins in 1605, when Henri IV laid out the Place Royale — our Place des Vosges. A perfect square, thirty-six pavilions of rose-colored brick, arcades for strolling under cover: Paris had never seen anything like it — a square designed not for commerce or processions, but for the sheer pleasure of being there. The nobility rushed in, and for a century the Marais was the ultimate address. Grand hôtels particuliers rose all around: the Hôtel de Sully, the Hôtel Carnavalet where Madame de Sévigné would write her letters, the Hôtel de Soubise with its gilded salons.

This was also the era when, fifty meters from our door, the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis rose — the great baroque gesture of the Jesuits, completed in 1641 and inspired by the Gesù in Rome. Richelieu himself said the first Mass there. When the evening sun gilds its façade, you understand why some of our guests write to tell us they spent their whole stay simply looking at it.

And then fashion moved on, as fashion always does. The court decamped to Versailles, the Faubourg Saint-Germain swept the board, and the Marais fell asleep for two centuries. Its palaces became workshops, fabric warehouses, small factories; the paneled salons filled with handcarts. The neighborhood filled with artisans, goldsmiths, and Jewish families from Eastern Europe around the rue des Rosiers. In the twentieth century, entire blocks — deemed "insalubrious" — were seriously considered for demolition.

That decline is what saved it. No one could afford to demolish, so everything remained. When André Malraux passed the first law on protected heritage districts in 1962, the Marais became France's great restoration project: façades were cleaned, beams uncovered, courtyards reopened. The palaces were reborn as museums, the workshops as galleries.

Today, you walk through this stage set every time you step outside. The Carnavalet tells the story of Paris across two hôtels particuliers, free of charge. The Musée Picasso occupies the most sumptuous mansion in the neighborhood. The rue des Rosiers still smells of babka, the rue de Turenne has given itself over to designers without losing its soul, and the Village Saint-Paul hides its antique dealers among four interconnecting courtyards.

Our advice, if you come stay with us: go out at least once before 9 a.m. In the morning, before the boutiques open, the Marais becomes what it has always been — a village of honey-colored stone where you can hear your own footsteps. The regulars do their shopping at the Place Baudoyer market, cut through the garden of the Hôtel de Sully to reach the Place des Vosges, and keep the secret. Now you have it too.