A clashing mix of pea-green walls, leopard-print furnishings and candy-striped beds feature in this hotel that British designer Luke Edward Hall has completed in Paris.
Hotel Les Deux Gares is tucked down a narrow street in Paris’ 10th arrondissement, set between two of the city’s major train stations – Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est.
The five-storey building had been left vacant for a number of years, but when Luke Edward Hall was brought on board to design the interiors, the focus wasn’t on making the rooms seem more contemporary.
Hall instead set out to fashion an “anti-modern” aesthetic that nodded to a Paris of the past.
“I love listening to stories from the past and feeling as though I’m entering another, more elegant era,” explained Hall, who is based in London.
“I always begin my projects by leafing through old books and magazines; then, I visit galleries and museums. I allow myself the time to dream and invent stories.”
The hotel is entered via a vivid lobby, where Hall has created a riotous collision of pattern and colour. The lower half of the walls have been painted pea-green, while the upper half has been covered in chintzy, pale blue wallpaper with a maroon-coloured motif.
Black-and-white chevron flooring runs throughout.
Guests can sit back on the room’s plush sofas – one of which is completely upholstered in leopard print fabric, the other is cobalt blue with bright-red fringing. There’s also a couple of striped pink-satin armchairs arranged beneath a portrait that Hall painted himself.
“I really wanted this space to feel above all joyful and welcoming and alive, classic but a little bonkers at the same time,” added Hall.
This bold palette continues upstairs in the forty guest bedrooms, which have been painted sky blue, violet or olive green.
Each room features geometric carpeting, a candy-striped headboard and a canary-yellow armchair and pouf created bespoke by Hall.
The designer has also personalised the reading lamps above the bedside tables with sketchy doodles of martini glasses, the Eiffel tower and different French words.
Even the hotel’s gym boasts graphic red-and-white checkerboard flooring and floral wallpaper from Swedish homeware brand Svenskt Tenn.
Breakfast can be enjoyed down in the lobby, or across the street from the hotel in Cafe Les Deux Gares which Hall also designed.
Intended to feel much like a traditional Parisian eatery, the space has been finished with stripy seating banquettes and wooden bistro chairs from Thonet.
Vintage exhibition posters have also been mounted on the walls in a wink at the fact that the city’s cafes were once hotspots for “social and cultural exchange”.
The cafe is topped by a tortoiseshell-effect ceiling painted by local artist Pauline Leyravaud.
Hotel Les Deux Gares is the first large-scale interiors project by Luke Edward Hall, who set up his self-titled design studio in 2015.
Other spots to stay around the French capital include hotel Hoy, which has TV-free rooms and an in-house yoga studio so that guests can escape the chaotic hustle and bustle of Paris’ streets.
Photography is by Benoit Linero.
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