Le Pigalle

Le Pigalle opened in 2015 at 9 Rue Frochot, a short street of late bars running south from Place Pigalle, in the slice of the 9th that Parisians call South Pigalle. It has 40 rooms and four stars and was conceived as a hôtel de quartier, a neighbourhood hotel, for a district with no monument of its own. Festen Architecture gave it Parisian bones, panelled doors, mouldings and parquet, then borrowed from the streets outside: terrazzo floors like the local bars, the cheap veined marble of the old faubourg, and leopard and oxblood touches in the lift for the old brothels.

The rooms are named for their size. Pigalle 12 is a single with a bar and a turntable. Pigalle 15, at 14 to 16 m², opens onto Rue Frochot, some rooms with a balcony, and Pigalle 17 onto the street or the rooftops; both have a shower open to the room. Pigalle 21 is the one to book for the music: 21 m², a bar cabinet, a turntable and records picked for the room by Victor Kiswell, a collector who grew up in Pigalle. Pigalle 22 puts the bath in the bedroom, and Pigalle 35, the one suite, sits under the roof on the top floor, where the street side has a glimpse of Sacré-Cœur's dome and bell tower over the roofs opposite. Books, vintage furniture and Le Labo toiletries run through them all.

What makes it the insider's hotel is the ground floor, which belongs to Pigalle as much as to the guests: café, restaurant and bar in one room, with a vinyl library, a kiosk of papers and books, and DJs in the evening. The kitchen runs from 7am to 11pm, and until 2am from Thursday to Saturday, breakfast lasts until 4pm and room service never closes. The croissants come from a nearby bakery, the prints on the walls are by photographers who have long worked these streets, and the team is local and will point you to the neighbourhood's people and places. Chambre 01, two doors along, is the hotel's red cocktail bar. Sacré-Cœur is a 12-minute climb.

The trade is sleep and space. The bar is busy until 2am at the end of the week, the other bars on Rue Frochot keep the street lively at night, and at weekends the noise can reach the rooms; the courtyard rooms are quieter. The entry rooms are small, the doubles have open bathrooms, rooms take two people at most, and there is no spa, gym, pool or parking of its own. On a February night the entry double is about €285. Book it to live inside a Paris neighbourhood, and plan your evenings downstairs.