Hôtel Le 10 Bis. Part 1: The Meaning of Boutique (#720)

We arrived at Hôtel Le 10 Bis almost by accident.

Our original hotel for our final two nights in Paris was unavailable, and after a little searching we found ourselves booked into a place I had never heard of, at 10 bis Rue du Débarcadère in the 17th arrondissement, not far from Porte Maillot.

It described itself as a boutique hotel.

I have seen that description hundreds of times.

Boutique hotel. Boutique resort. Boutique accommodation.

It is one of those expressions that has become so familiar - and so enthusiastically employed by the hospitality industry - that I had never really stopped to ask what it meant.

Until we stayed at Hôtel Le 10 Bis.

What Is a Boutique Hotel?

The interesting thing is that boutique hotel is not an official French hotel classification.

There is no government inspector arriving with a clipboard and announcing that a hotel has successfully passed its boutique examination.

The term is more elusive than that.

It generally describes a relatively small hotel with a strong individual identity:

Distinctive design, intimate public spaces, personal service and, perhaps most importantly, a sense that the hotel belongs to the city in which it stands.

Boutique does not necessarily mean expensive. It does not mean luxurious. It does not mean historic. It does not even necessarily mean independently owned.

And smallness alone is not enough. A small hotel can be thoroughly ordinary.

The word boutique has also become a marketing device. Almost any hotel can call itself boutique. A large hotel with identical rooms, automated check-in and décor that could have been transported wholesale from London, Los Angeles or Singapore can put boutique on its website.

That does not necessarily make it one.

A genuine boutique hotel seems to require something less easily measured.

Personality.

And Hôtel Le 10 Bis has plenty of that.

Twenty-Three Rooms

The first clue is size.

Hôtel Le 10 Bis has only 23 rooms and suites.

You don't arrive through a sweeping driveway. There is no cavernous marble lobby, no procession of bellmen, no line of guests waiting to check in and no reception desk stretching majestically across half a room.

You walk through the front door and you are simply…there.

Reception is a few steps away. The lounge is beside it. The lift is small. Everything is close.

And almost immediately something subtle happens.

You cease being Room 503.

You become a person.

The person behind the desk recognizes you when you return. Someone says bonjour as you leave in the morning. Someone asks how your day went when you come back.

It isn't grand hospitality.

It is personal hospitality.

There is a difference.

Designed Rather Than Standardized

Perhaps that is where I had misunderstood the word boutique.

What makes a hotel boutique is not simply that it is small.

It is that somebody has made deliberate decisions about how the place should feel.

At Hôtel Le 10 Bis, black and gold predominate, softened by velvet chairs, mirrors and warm furnishings. There is a small lounge rather than a lobby in the conventional sense.

You can sit there with a coffee. Read a newspaper. Have a glass of wine. Watch people come and go.

There isn't really enough room to be anonymous.

Perhaps that is part of the point.

Large international hotels have perfected something quite different:

Consistency.

And there is enormous value in that.

Walk into one in Paris, Sydney, New York or Singapore and you know approximately what will happen. The lobby will look reassuringly familiar. The room will work in familiar ways. Breakfast will appear where breakfast is supposed to appear. The systems have been designed so that surprises are minimized.

That is their strength.

But perhaps it is also their weakness.

Because travel, at its best, is partly about surprises.

At a boutique hotel the lift may be ridiculously small. The bedroom may contain an unexpected corner. The breakfast room may have only a handful of tables. You may find yourself sitting beside the same guests you saw yesterday morning.

And the person who handed you your key last night may be the same person wishing you a pleasant day this morning.

Efficiency has been exchanged for intimacy.

Standardization for personality.

Scale for recognition.

Paris Is Made for Boutique Hotels

Perhaps no city is better suited to the idea than Paris.

Many Parisian hotels occupy buildings that began life as private residences or apartment houses.

They inherited narrow staircases, tiny courtyards, odd corners, irregular rooms, balconies, fireplaces and peculiar floor plans.

A large hotel chain might regard these things as problems to be engineered away.

A boutique hotel can turn them into character.

That difference captures something important.

A great international hotel effectively says:

Wherever you are in the world, you know what you're going to get.

A great Paris boutique hotel says almost the opposite:

You couldn't be anywhere else.

Paris Outside the Door

Then there is the neighborhood.

This isn't the Paris of enormous hotels overlooking the Place de la Concorde.

Step outside Hôtel Le 10 Bis and you are on a relatively ordinary street in the 17th arrondissement.

There are apartment buildings. Cafés. Restaurants. Boulangeries. People carrying groceries home. Dogs being walked. Scooters somehow squeezing into spaces that appear physically incapable of accommodating them.

Nearby is the enormous Palais des Congrès.

Walk farther and you reach the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées.

But Rue du Débarcadère itself feels different.

It feels lived in.

And perhaps that is another ingredient of the true boutique hotel.

You aren't merely visiting Paris.

For a couple of days, you have an address in Paris.

10 bis Rue du Débarcadère.

There is something rather nice about that.

But Hôtel Le 10 Bis Has a Secret

And then I discovered that our little boutique hotel had another qualification that no corporate designer could manufacture.

It had a past.

Hôtel Le 10 Bis opened in its present form in 2016, but the building had enjoyed a considerably more colorful existence before becoming a quiet four-star hotel.

This will be the subject of my next blog titled:

Hôtel Le 10 Bis. Part 2: The Redhead Behind the Door.

An earlier description from the hotel itself used the wonderfully delicate French phrase “haut lieu de la galanterie parisienne.”

Literally, it suggests a celebrated place of Parisian gallantry.

But this was not gallantry in the sense of gentlemen opening doors for ladies.

The phrase was a discreet way of acknowledging the building's association with a rather more adventurous side of Parisian nightlife.

In other words, 10 bis Rue du Débarcadère had seen things.

Exactly what happened behind its doors belongs to the half-hidden history of Paris - the city that has always possessed both a respectable public face and another existence conducted after dark.

Hôtel Le 10 Bis Today

Things today are considerably quieter than in the past.

Suitcases roll through the doorway. Guests sit in the little lounge. Coffee is served. Breakfast appears. Someone at reception wishes you bonne journée.

The transformation seems wonderfully Parisian.

Cities such as Paris do not simply demolish their past and begin again.

Buildings accumulate lives.

A façade remains while generations of people pass behind it. A doorway does not necessarily tell you everything that has happened on the other side.

The elegant little hotel in which you are drinking your morning coffee may have been something altogether different once.

That history matters because it adds another element to what makes Hôtel Le 10 Bis genuinely boutique.

Its personality was not entirely created by an interior designer.

Some of it was already there.

Boutique

By our second day at Hôtel Le 10 Bis, I thought I understood the word boutique a little better.

Boutique isn't really about thread count. It isn't about how many stars appear beside the hotel's name. It isn't about whether somebody has placed an espresso machine in your room. And it certainly isn't about attaching a fashionable adjective to a hotel website.

It is about scale, individuality, place and human contact.

A boutique hotel is small enough to have a personality. Small enough for the people working there to notice the people staying there. Small enough that the building can retain its peculiarities instead of having them engineered away. And perhaps small enough for you to remember it afterward.

Hôtel Le 10 Bis happens to possess something else as well.

A past sufficiently colorful to remind us that the room in which we sleep tonight existed before we arrived and will continue its story after we leave.

We will undoubtedly stay in bigger hotels. Grander hotels. Hotels with better views, larger bedrooms, enormous breakfast buffets and much more impressive lobbies.

But when someone next tells me they are staying in a boutique hotel, I will understand the description rather differently.

I will think of a small doorway on Rue du Débarcadère. Twenty-three rooms. A tiny lift. A little lounge. Someone behind the desk who recognizes you. A building with a past it does not advertise too loudly.

And, most of all, the curious feeling, however briefly, that:

Rather than simply staying in Paris, you have an address there.

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