LLG Travels: Hotel de la Tremoille, Paris. Room Review

I do like it when I can walk in to a hotel room, fling open French windows and just know that I am in Paris. A wrought iron balcony, sheer window shades, sun pouring in…it’s the stuff of romance. Shame that, as per, I was a seul.

Oh I did have the most wonderful 24hrs in Paris last week. My hotel for the night was the 5-star Hotel de la Tremoille, right in the middle of the Golden Triangle in the 8^th district — as noted before, it’s handily situated for Avenue Montaigne, Dior, Balmain and the Tour Eiffel, as well as the Champs-Elysées — none of which I managed to visit this time.

 

The hotel isn’t large: there are 93 rooms, including 8 junior suites, and 5 one-bedroom suites, and it feels low key and discreet. There’s none of the bustle-y lobby action or group checking in you find in larger hotels, however luxe they are.

My room was on the fourth floor, overlooking rue de la Tremoille, but it’s a quiet street and there was absolutely no noise floating up, so I was able to fling open both sets of French windows to let the light flood in. (I’m not a fan of aircon.) The sheets are the kind I wish I could afford to buy myself and I slept the sleep of the just.

The bathroom was spacious, with separate cabines for both the loo and the shower. I was really impressed to see that they had eschewed those frustrating mini bottles of shower gel and shampoo, replacing them with full size bottles of Molton Brown toiletries, handily attached to the wall with pump dispensers, so no more fiddling about with stupid caps, and trying to squeeze out blobs of product. (They still had a few minis for hand lotion and the like.)

So much more practical and much better in terms of waste and the environment. I can only think of one other hotel group that does this: Soho House, and I wish that more hotels would adopt this practice.

This is the view over the rooftops that I woke up to the next morning:

Before I arrived I received several messages and Tweets telling me to be sure to find the Hatch in my room. I had visions of a superhero style escape hatch, but it turned out to be an exceedingly clever and useful privacy hatch for room-service and in-room deliveries, so you need never open a door in your bathrobe ever again.

Generally I like to go downstairs for breakfast, to get an idea of the clientele — and to encourage me to actually get out of bed in the morning. But I felt it was my duty to order breakfast in bed for hatch-checking purposes.

So I did.

And sure, enough, whilst I was in the shower, my breakfast was stealthily placed in the hatch through its separate door in the hallway. All I had to do was unlock the interior door and there it was:

And goodness, this must be the best, hands down best, room service breakfast on record. The orange was freshly pressed in the hotel, the butter was Echire, the green tea Mariage Freres, the omelette absolutely correct, the Viennoiserie and petit pain fresh that morning. I was a very, very happy girl. Not least because I was full enough not to eat the on-board Eurostar lunch.

This hotel is all about its intimate charm: it’s not the place to stay if you want to see and be seen, or if you want to feel like you are at the centre of a buzzy scene. But several of my friends on Vogue and other magazines regularly choose tostay here, and chic guests drift through the lobby throughout the day.

I know which kind of hotel I prefer…

HOTEL DE LA TREMOILLE — 14 rue de la Trémoille — 75008 Paris — Tel. : +33 (0)1 56 52 14 00

www.tremoille.com

NB. I noticed on the hotel’s website that they have good package rates for overnight stays and spa treatments, and for winter stays, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for these.

LLG was a guest of the Hotel de la Trémoille