A spate of new cocktail bars and fashion boutiques has revived Paris’ SoPi (South of Pigalle) neighborhood in recent years, helping to shed the area of its seedy reputation as a red-light bazaar for sex shops, bordellos, and cabarets like the Moulin Rouge. But as urban renewal softens the area’s edges one cool-kid newcomer at a time— the Experimental Cocktail Club’s first hotel concept, Grand Pigalle, is set to debut in April of 2015, for example— the just-opened Maison Souquet is hoping to keep some of the raffish spirit alive. Here heritage-chic master Jacques Garcia (responsible for New York City’s NoMad Hotel and the Hôtel Costes in Paris) plays up SoPi’s past with a sultry design that turns the former pleasure house into an elegant Belle Époque bolthole.
Behind an unmarked façade in the ninth arrondissement, a vampy style permeates the twenty individually decorated rooms (blood-red fleur-de-lis wallpaper and custom Chinese silk headboards) that are named for infamous courtesans, and the salon, where velvet banquettes and a cast-iron fireplace are the setting for black truffle cocoa and late-night aperitifs. Even the spa feels like a lurid fantasy: the illuminated plunge pool glows against a pomegranate ceiling emblazoned with a gold-flecked solar system, just steps from a hammam.
Rico says this would have been a good place to go before menopause...
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