Seriously, is there a hotel in Paris that doesn't make us swoon?
Add to your Insta feed one of the City of Light's latest openings: Brach, a 59-room property in the posh 16th arrondissement. Starchitect Philippe Starck went to task on the new boutique hotel's design.
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"Brach is a mix between modern Bauhaus and the surprise and wonder of Africa," says Starck. "It's all about culture, about these life moments when things happen, these moments of uncertainty in between."
"It is a place full of what I call 'fertile surprises,'" he says about the Evok Hotels Collection property. "Everywhere you look, there is a surprise, there is a game. A Chareau stool by the Maison de Verre positioned here, an Italian folding knife from the beginning of the century over there, an African stool here." Wood, stone, leather, concrete, and bronze are dominant materials, but with a soft twist away from cold modernism.
Transforming this former mail-sorting facility into a boutique hotel was no small feat.
"The industrial structure of the building appealed to me," says Starck. "We had to redo everything inside out." While some architects might shudder at that, this was in perfect pitch with Starck's process. He likes to start with "a blank page": "I visualize my projects in an unconscious way, as in a dream, a piece of poetry, something unsaid."
