If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR316.82), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
What if you could stand out in the Parisian hotel scene… Imagine transforming a gentrified block in the ninth arrondissement into an upscale stay with flamboyant Martin Brudnizski interiors. Now envision adding pristinely planted outdoor spaces, Juliet balconies, private terraces, and a crowning rooftop bar. And you may as well go all out and conjure a spa and top-notch California-inspired dining, too. Et voilà! Rue Cadet newcomer, La Fantaisie, becomes reality.
Smith Extra
Get this when you book through us:
A patisserie and soft drink each or, when you stay three nights or longer, a bottle of champagne
Double rooms from £298.45 (€349), including tax at 10 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of €10.73 per person per night on check-out.
More details
Rates are room-only, but you can buy buffet breakfast at the Golden Poppy restaurant, from €30 a person (or half price for children aged five to 12).
Also
Three of the hotel’s Deluxe rooms have been adapted for wheelchair users, and ramps and elevators allow access to most communal areas.
At the hotel
Café, fitness room, and free WiFi throughout. In rooms: smart TV, Bluetooth speaker, contactless phone charger, air-conditioning, minibar stocked with local products, coffee- and tea-making kit, free bottled water, bathrobes and slippers, and Holidermie vegan bath products.
Our favourite rooms
A love of colour and pattern that’s much more catwalk than kindergarten is evident across all rooms, realised in textural wallcoverings, a profusion of zig zags, decorative furniture panels, vivid-green woodwork, and elegant retro lighting. We’re drawn to the rooms and suites that come with terraces, for the sheer luxury of private outdoor space in Paris, but Comfort and Superior rooms have this in pocket form, courtesy of Juliet balconies. The sixth-floor Suite Terrace tops the building and our chart.
Spa
The basement Holidermie Spa is a cosseting space, framed with botanical motifs and the hotel’s trademark gold-and-green decor. There’s an emphasis on water-based therapies, with a large Jacuzzi, mineral water pool, hot or cold baths, sauna and a hammam at your disposal. And you can discover the Holidermie brand’s holistic, vegan products with a face or body therapy in one of the spa’s three treatment rooms. The complex also houses the hotel’s fitness room, kitted out with stylishly timbered gym equipment.
Packing tips
In this maximalist space, beware or embrace colour-clashing as your tastes allow. And bring more layers rather than fewer, to max out your staying power in the garden or on the rooftop.
Also
If you’re enchanted by the hotel’s thoughtfully curated interiors, you’ll find a similar, playful sartorial flair in La Fantaisie’s sister hotel in the Alps, Smith-approved Coeur de Megève.
Welcome – under-12s are charged as children; junior suites and larger suites accommodate two children on a sofa-bed, and the hotel’s outdoor spaces and relaxed café-dining are suitably family-friendly.
Best for
All are welcome, but the grown-up ambience at La Fantaisie suggests this is a hotel best suited to over-eights.
Recommended rooms
Junior Suites and up have a sofa-bed that will sleep two children. A free cot can be added to most room types. Book the Apartment Terrace for a two-bedroom, top-floor stunner.
Crèche
There’s no daytime provision at La Fantaisie, but with so many of the capital’s child-friendly attractions nearby, family time is easily timetabled.
Activities
Museum- and gallery-hopping, boat trips down the Seine; chocolate-sampling at A la Mère de Famille, and double-taking at waxworks at Musée Grevin.
Meals
Under-fives dine free at La Fantaisie, and children aged five to 12 enjoy a 50 per cent discount.
Babysitting
The hotel can help arrange babysitting with advance notice (price on enquiry).
Sustainability efforts
La Fantaisie is a single-use-plastic-free zone, is run with rigorous recycling policies, and works with local suppliers and seasonal produce as priorities.
In a city where hotels are often confined indoors by historic proportions, dining alfresco feels especially indulgent, and apéritifs on the rooftop are hard to beat.
Dress Code
Be inspired by your botanical surroundings to wear floral tea dresses, bouquet brights, or richly hued silks.
Hotel restaurant
Golden Poppy is a vibrant botanically-themed space to the rear of the hotel, with indoor dining, and courtyard garden tables, linked by an awning-shaded conversatory. Transforming Parisian produce with her trademark non-conformist thinking is Breton chef Dominique Crenn: her menu is a celebration of seasonal ingredients, mostly plant based, and sustainably sourced seafood. Plates such as grilled broccoli with black-sesame pesto, sea-bass ceviche with pea milk, and house tacos with abalone, kimchi and avocado are a triumph of flavour and originality. Golden Poppy is also the setting for buffet breakfast, with savoury and sweet options lining up to kickstart your day. Crenn also steers the culinary direction at the Café, at the front of the hotel, which attracts passers-by as well as hotel guests, and is open for Cali plates, some with Asian twists: expect colourful salads, mushroom dumplings, kimchi fried eggs, and a fish pot with crispy tofu.
Hotel bar
Vying for the title of La Fantaisie’s most chichi hangout, Le Bar Sur Le Toit (‘on the roof’) has tables indoors and out, and from 5pm serves tikis, punches, mules and margaritas, as well as mocktails, in red-gold-and-green surroundings dressed with opulence and touches of Twenties-style glamour. Its Parisian rooftop views are an ideal accompaniment.
Last orders
Breakfast is served, 7am until 10.30am; lunch is between noon and 2pm; dinner’s from 7pm until 10pm. The Café is open from 8am until 10.30pm.
Room service
A dedicated menu of snacks and small plates is available to order to your room, day or night.
La Fantaisie is on Rue Cadet in the arty 9ème arrondissement, a buzzing neighbourhood of theatres, eateries and shops.
Planes
Paris-Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports are each around 45 minutes from the hotel by road (www.parisaeroport.fr/en).
Trains
Gare du Nord is a 10-minute taxi ride from the hotel and private transfers can be arranged from €100 one way. Cadet (line 7) is the nearest Métro station.
Automobiles
Cars in the capital play second fiddle to public transport and are best left at home. For those who are devoted to driving, La Fantaisie has four parking spaces available from €50 a night, including valet parking.
Worth getting out of bed for
Between Le Marais and Montmartre, the bohemian 9ème arrondissement puts you in a prime spot from which to access the well documented delights of central Paris, so here’s a taste of all that’s walkable from La Fantaisie. Around the corner from the hotel, A la Mère de Famille is a delectable boutique from the city’s oldest chocolate factory, founded in 1761. Also just a stroll away, you’ll find the colonnaded opera house, Palais Garnier. And a bouquet’s throw from the latter is the Perfume Museum, which successfully makes sense of making scents. Head south to Grand Boulevards, notable for its antique passages (covered arcades) including Passage Jouffroy, Passage Verdeau, and Gallerie Vivienne. A weightier retail fix can be found at stalwart department store Galeries Lafayette. Check out the calendar of gigs and cinema showings at art deco venue, Le Grand Rex. A walking tour around Pigalle and the red light district’s Boulevard de Clichy is time well spent for art lovers, taking in the haunts of Picasso, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Local restaurants
A classic Parisian bistro on your doorstep from La Fantaisie is Le Petit Cadet, where you can dine on signature burgers, Gallic classics such as entrecôte de boeuf and cordon bleu, as well as salads and sharing platters of charcuterie and tapas. As the name suggests, Bien Elevé on Rue Richer is all about responsibly reared meat (steak-frites, suprême de volaille and cuts of the day): but it’s also about delicate plates of fish, finessed desserts and assiettes du fromage.
Local bars
Tuesday to Saturday from 6pm, Venetian-pink-walled Amaro, a short walk from La Fantaisie, is the tastiest kind of art lesson in mixology: study its seasonal selection of concoctions dedicated to bitters (negronis, vermouths and namesake brandies), accompanied by Italian small plates including tramezzini (tiny sandwiches) and cicchetti. Speakeasy cocktail club, No Entry, is in the basement of Pink Mamma Italian restaurant, in South Pigalle, and is a sultry pink-lit den specialising in Italian tipples (where the design is also by Fantaisie’s interiors maestro, Martin Brudnizki).
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this polished Parisian stay in the ninth arrondissement and unpacked their handmade chocolates and Holidermie spa products, a full account of their French city break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside La Fantaisie in Paris…
Newcomer to the Ninth, boutique hotel La Fantaisie is thinking fresh about hospitality in Paris. Housed in a traditional block on Rue Cadet, this overhauled des-res excels in surprises. First, there’s its exterior – given a serious contemporary facelift, which means that many of its rooms and suites now have either a Juliet balcony or furnished terrace. Its playful decor by Martin Brudnizki, too, is far from expected, modelling an exuberant love of colour and pattern in vividly-hued paintwork, tactile wallcoverings, and an abundance of zig zags. The hotel’s cuisine also throws a welcome curveball, with Dominique Crenn’s unusual Cali-inspired plates focused on plants and seafood rather than Parisians’ beloved viande. It’s in this urban stay’s embrace of nature, however, that the hotel’s flight into fantasy is most apparent: there’s a vibrantly planted garden to the rear (acknowledging the area’s market-garden past, as a neighbourhood known for growing and selling produce). And a Twenties-glamorous rooftop bar with tables alfresco means you can drink in the city skyscape with your tiki or punch. We’re raising a glass to this triumph of design over city limits…
