Two New Budget-Friendly Paris Hotels (One is Now a Favorite)

Plus, why are rich people so boring?

Oct 05, 2024

There is a trend on TikTok in which foreigners mimic attempts to speak French in Paris. They are immediately interrupted by the French waiter or shopkeeper who, horrified at their attempt in French, responds curtly in accented English, making clear they’d rather speak English than suffer through foreign attempts at French.

It’s only slightly exaggerated from reality in my experience, and a remarkable twist from a decade ago when “the proper thing” to do was to stumble your way through your high school French because the waiters either spoke no English or wouldn’t deign to do so.

For the past couple years, I’ve acquiesced to this new world, but on my most recent visit last month I decided to try something out. When they responded in English, I plowed right ahead in my now-stilted French. Miracle of miracles, every single time, they switched back to French.

(At this point, my French is basically Margot Martindale’s story in Paris, je t’aime, which also remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever watched.)

Paris brings out strange feelings for a lot of tourists. For centuries, the French have so adeptly curated and marketed this concept of Parisian culture that one can easily feel insecure here. You feel you need to dress the most stylish and expensive you’ve ever dressed, stay in the most beautiful of places, and dine at the most extravagant restaurants. These expectations can lead to disappointment when Paris turns out not to be a movie set on which your most romantic of fantasies will unfold. (A disillusionment Chinese tourists called “Paris Syndrome.”)

It can also put unnecessary pressure on your bank account.

After all, the French themselves are incredibly frugal—borderline cheap. They are not dressed in designer clothes head to toe. Their baby clothes are just as likely to come from a Monoprix as a Bonpoint. Day after day, they walk past world-famous Michelin-star restaurants to dine at relatively mediocre corner brasseries with reasonable fixed price menus. My friends working at the same fashion houses spinning tales of necessary luxuries would faint if they were asked to pay for a five star hotel here.

Despite what you may have convinced yourself or whatever pressure you feel from social media, it is far from necessary to stay at a luxury hotel in Paris. After all, if you’re doing Paris right, you’ll only be in it to sleep. So whether trying to practice French or booking a hotel, we should all be less self-conscious.

With that in mind, on my recent visit we checked out to two of the city’s newest hotels that fall into the affordable range (starting at less than $300 a night): Bloom House Hotel & Spa and Hôtel Chamar.

bloomhouse.hotelspa

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Bloom House Hotel & Spa (paid 283 euros)

It’s in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, a quick walk north from the east side of the Gare du Nord. While it looks out on traditional Parisian edifices, this hotel that opened nearly a year ago is housed in a contemporary all-white box type structure.

The decor in the lobby is what I’d call millennial-French-Riviera-by-way-of-Tulum, with a profusion of hanging plants, bamboo, pinks, and a reflecting pool with a floatie in the lobby. The rooms are efficiently designed, i.e. not sprawling, but not trip-over-your-suitcase tight. They were also exceptionally quiet, both in terms of street noise and noise from the hallway or rooms next door. My sole criticism beyond the design not matching my personal preferences would be the pillows felt flimsy and cheap.

Each floor is equipped with a filtered water machine you can use to fill up with chilled still or sparkling water. The service was cheerful and prompt, almost American in its ebullience. The gym has enough equipment to get a light workout in. The main draw, though, is the pool and sauna. Such a draw, in fact, that the large underground pool was nearly always full every time we ventured down. The sauna, though, was a great benefit on a rain-soaked visit and pretty large.

Overall, not my aesthetic or first choice, but if operating on a budget I would have no problem staying here again.

hotelchamar

A post shared by @hotelchamar

Hôtel Chamar (paid 225 euros)

There has been no press about this new owner-operated hotel recently opened after a couple renovated it from a Tim Hotel (a chain in Paris). So it’s about as under the radar as it gets.

The hotel is a mere 24 rooms, and designed in the kind of millennial minimalism that I think will stand the test of time—not too cold, and embellished with tasteful touches that give it personality. All the rooms have parquet wood floors, high ceilings, lots of fluted glass, round corner mirrors, and black-and-white terrazzo paneled bathrooms.

The starter rooms are small, but seemed bigger than what they actually were because of the design, and it felt much more “4 Stars” than many 4 star hotels in Paris. We were worried that there would be a lot of sound from the elevator (a common problem in smaller Paris hotels) but didn’t notice any. And service was lovely, which gave the whole experience more of an intimate quality.

Hôtel Chamar is located in Pigalle, one of my favorite parts of Paris as you have quick access to Montmartre without being so far uphill and it’s really a quick shot to so much of the right bank.

It still feels like I got away with something stumbling on this hotel while scouring for reasonably priced places during fashion week. Even if prices went up slightly here I’d still be happy to stay again, as being here you have the sense that every decision the owners made was thoughtful.

DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES

Everybody should read the recent essay in the Washington Post titled, “Why are rich people so boring?” Partly because it’s the first time in a long time I’ve seen really sharp, understandable, and relevant fashion criticism given how beholden so much of fashion media is to access or prone to fangirling. I only wish the author had more space to expound further, to take a look at the French brands, at what really is driving the defining-down of luxury, and the feeling on my part that there is a deep creative rot in the industry nobody wants to talk about because the money machine needs to keep going. I also wish it did more to critique the consumer—after all, these fashion companies are responding to them.

Because the same goes for hotels. According to CoStar, the number of hotels commanding an average daily rate (ADR) of $1,000 or more has roughly quadrupled in the U.S. and Italy and more than doubled in France. But have hotels gotten more luxurious? The Lutetia in Paris started at $900 a night 5 years ago, now it’s $1,600. I don’t mean to pick on the Lutetia as one could pick any number of hotels in NYC or Paris, but why?

I know why hotels do it, especially since RevPAR rather than occupancy is the name of the game for luxury hotels—less wear and tear, you get to upgrade customers who feel they’re getting royal treatment, easier to give better service, etc. But no matter how wealthy you are, is there not a sense that you’re being played a fool? Paying these exorbitant rates for nothing different in product?

Do the rich not want to demand more for what they’re paying?

Is the New York Times travel section trying to become The Cut? It certainly seems like it the past couple weeks. First, there was the newspaper spending more than $10,000 on a reporter trying to experience what Eric Adams would experience flying business on Turkish Airlines. Then the newspaper dipped its toes into mining personal stories for online outrage. There’s the perfectly tin-eared feature in which food reporters take their son to France in the hopes of finding an egg dish he’ll eat—with readers appropriately mocking the paper for such a topic on Instagram. Other recent headlines include: “It was the best gelato I’d ever tasted. Was that because I’d survived a brain tumor?” and “How to cure my sex life? Dive for sea urchins.”

Heartbreak is the only word that comes to mind when I saw this tweet from the Schipol Airport account about the retirement of its last “over the wing” bridge. I really wish “over the wing” bridges were a solution that had worked out, as the boarding and deplaning processes are excruciating unless being done out the front and the back.

I know I’m being such a crank about driverless cars and my skepticism on their near-term future as a part of our traveling experience, so I of course smirked when I saw the recent story about a Waymo car getting stuck making a U-turn during Vice President Harris’s visit to San Francisco and a police officer having to manually get it out of there. I just don’t see how this technology’s evangelists think this stuff is right around the corner, whether from a standpoint of people being able to afford and want these cars, to the regulatory burdens that will likely be way worse in the aftermath of tech companies burning up all goodwill local governments once had towards them.

The Empire State Building strikes again:

I personally would hate to fly from somewhere in the U.S. on Southwest to BWI to then get on an IcelandAir plane to Reykiavik to then connect to Europe, but I do love that Southwest is making moves to compete and at least pay lip service to the fact that while domestic travel demand is soft, demand for flying across the Atlantic is incredibly strong. The airline recently announced a partnership with IcelandAir utilizing BWI as a connection hub between the two airlines.

Absolutely loved this trip down memory lane by The Wall Street Journal about grand hotels that fizzled and failed.

Amtrak should maybe stop trying to come up with $1,500 routes that take 48 hours and focus on delivering consistent products in places where people either use or need rail. And the responses on Twitter have been predictably brutal:

The Financial Times got a first look at The Manner, the new hotel in New York City from Standard International, the parent company of Standard Hotels. My gut reaction to the name a few months ago was not a good one. But as I’ve thought about it, I’m sure I wouldn’t have loved “The Standard” as a name at first. Now it’s world-famous and just seems right. So I’m holding off judgment for now, especially as I haven’t been to the property yet. I will say, though, the visuals in the feature are really something to look at—there’s no timidity here! And New York City really is missing a “cool” luxury hotel, so if it delivers it could end up being very successful. According to the FT, rooms will start at $899 a night.

One note: I have not visited the new White House Visitors Center but I will go soon. In the meantime, Bloomberg had a nice write-up of it.