Living for Le Collectionneur

The Hotel du Collectionneur is one of those buzzing mega-hotels in the City of Light that, in peak season, becomes a sort of joyous Tower of Babel, with every language under the sun audible in the breakfast room. There’s the customary lavish lobby with a beautifully graphic black and white marble floor, crystal chandeliers and fancy floral arrangements. There’s also a very civilised cocktail bar off the lobby (handy even if you’re not staying here, and find yourself, as you invariably will do at some point, near the Arc de Triomphe and Parc Monceau), and as of late 2018 there is a new destination dining room – Le Collectionneur.

While the hotel upstairs is a jam-on-jam concoction of 1930s flamboyance, Le Collectionneur takes the art deco tropes of swooping curves and elegant machine-age lines and does something bright and modern with them. It reduces the elements to something graphic but also three dimensional, with lots of backlighting of the different wall and ceiling panels to create depth and mood. Architects Edouard Cohen and Alexandre Danan have created a room, along with artistic director Andrea Cohen, that is dynamic and exciting. (And yes, it’s a family affair – Edouard and Andrea are siblings, and Danan is their uncle). The interior – furnished by pieces from Moroso in Italy – combines complex white sculptural panels with marble tables and velvet seats. There is brass and alabaster, and tableware mixing gold, silver and bronze – a nod to the magpie that has been adopted as the mascot and emblem for Le Collectionneur.

The food at Le Collectionneur is as you may expect – in the morning it’s the usual stacked-high buffet, with waiters on a constant tour of the room to replenish coffee cups. In the evening it heads for haute territory, with chefs Joel Veyssière and Nicolas Amelin taking you on a long-haul journey that includes sashimi with yuzu-ginger marinade, ravioli of langoustine and beans, turbot with honey-mustard sauce, gluten free gnocchi and the perfect onglet with carrots and onions.

One of the nicest things about Le Collectionneur is the garden, aka The 3 Terrasses. We can’t wait for warmer weather to enjoy a cocktail out there. It’s a place of calm in a city that has too few of them. But when the sun isn’t shining, or there’s la pluie battante, we’re happy to stay inside that beautiful new room. C

Hotel du Collectionneur, 51-57 Rue de Courcelles, 75008 Paris, France
+33 1 58 36 67 00; hotelducollectionneur.com