Château Voltaire

The shell was there first. La Coquille d'Or, the hotel's bar, is named after a 16th-century motif on one corner of 55-57 rue Saint-Roch, and when Thierry Gillier, who founded Zadig & Voltaire, made three buildings of the 17th and 18th centuries into a hotel of 32 rooms in 2021, the shell came indoors. Scallops light the bar's black lacquered ceiling, over stools with brass footrests at the counter, and the door from the street is marked by a lantern and nothing else. Below ground a fluted one lights the heated pool, which sits under a cream vault and is booked ahead, along with a sauna and cold showers. Festen, the architects, kept the rest pale, with whitewashed walls and coffered ceilings, and set a few heavier things against them: Louis XIII armchairs in needlepoint, and gold leaves woven into a dark carpet.

Recommended for couples who want the Louvre and rue Saint-Honoré on foot and a small hotel to come back to; the rooms take neither cots nor extra beds, which settles the family question. Breakfast is charged separately at Brasserie L'Emil, whose kitchen cooks straight through from noon to half past ten at night: scampi with fleur de sel or a sea bass carpaccio, at a stone-topped counter on high wooden stools. The bar opens at five and pours until half past one, an hour less on Sundays. The top floor belongs to the Suite Voltaire, whose private terrace Louis Benech planted with fig and apple trees among wild flowers. Benech was one of the two landscape architects who won the 1990 competition to renovate the Tuileries, a short walk away, and the suite's terrace has something the Tuileries never had: room service.