The delights of SO/ Paris, a new boutique hotel in a quiet and somewhat obscure corner of the Marais, begin with the cookie made of nuts, cranberries, and white chocolate that is waiting in every guest room.
Located on the banks of the Seine, the hotel is both in the middle of nowhere and the center of everything: a quick crossing to the Rive Gauche, 30 seconds from Île Saint-Louis, and in the other direction, the animated Bastille neighborhood.
The interiors nod to the Marais and its history. In the lobby, stone tiles are arranged in a peacock-fan design, mimicking typical cobblestone patterns. The staff wear designs by Guillaume Henry, artistic director of LVMH-owned Patou. Some of the sweaters have nautical stripes, a tribute not just to Paris’s connection to fashion but to the Seine and the commerce it has enabled for centuries.
Above all, SO/ Paris celebrates its proximity to the river. The building’s original columns have been newly encased in a white plume structure, evoking a fountain, while the lobby’s terrazzo walls are inscribed with a line delineating the water level during the great flood of 1910.
The hotel occupies the ground floor as well as Floors 7 through 16 of a former administrative building, redeveloped by the architect David Chipperfield and now known as Morland Mixité Capitale, that dates to 1963. “This is where we used to come to get our construction permits signed,” says Julia Capp, C.E.O. of architecture firm RDAI, which designed SO/ Paris as well as every Hermès boutique worldwide.
Many guest rooms have postcard views of the Eiffel Tower, the Panthéon, and Square Barye, a meditative secret park that juts into the Seine from the tip of Île Saint-Louis. The imposing figure of Genevieve (the patron saint of Paris) created by Paul Landowski, the sculptor of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, towers over the Pont de la Tournelle.
An intuitive, engaging design that settles the weary traveler is a rarity in five-star hotels these days, where splashy lobbies can overpower disappointing rooms. The shower, encased in copper miniature mosaic tiles, was operated by a simple push button rather than something out of M.I.T.’s Space Propulsion Laboratory.
Throughout, yellows and blues echo water and sun. Copper-tinted mirrors, which line the halls, are installed in a block-like pattern, recalling the limestone bricks in Paris’s Haussmannian buildings as well as the rusty sheen of the city’s rooftops at sunset.
At the restaurant Bonnie, a fashion-world favorite on the 16th floor, a mirrored-ceiling installation by Olafur Eliasson reveals the Bateaux Mouches making their way up the river.
The SO/ Paris also delivers on creature comforts: a beautiful spa with products from Codage; a coffee bar dispensing an excellent café crème; Angelina chocolates at bedtime.
But most appealing of all is how the hotel’s windows invite and magnify the city’s dramatic light. When opening my door from the intentionally dark hallway, spread out before me was a broad panorama of the great city on the Seine, awash in its signature luminescence.
The writer was a guest of SO/ Paris, where room rates begin at $600 per night
Marcia DeSanctis is a contributing writer at Travel + Leisure and writes essays and stories for Vogue, Town & Country, Departures, and BBC Travel. Her collection of travel essays is called A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
