Why you should experience Les Bains Paris in Paris, France.
Les Bains Paris is a fascinating luxury hotel where Arts-et-Métiers's creative character, Belle Époque bathing culture, underground music history and generations of artistic experimentation converge inside one of Paris's most storied social addresses.
Set along Rue du Bourg-l'Abbé near Rue Saint-Martin and just steps from Centre Pompidou, the hotel occupies the former Les Bains Guerbois, opened in 1885 as fashionable private baths before becoming Les Bains Douches in 1978 and ultimately a 39-room five-star hotel under Jean-Pierre Marois in 2015. Architect Vincent Bastie worked with designers Tristan Auer and Denis Montel on the reinvention, preserving the building's cultural memory while creating guestrooms, Le Roxo, a spa and a revived subterranean club around the surviving swimming-pool tradition. Philippe Starck's celebrated black-and-white checkerboard dance floor remains embedded within the club's visual vocabulary, connecting the contemporary property directly with the room where musicians, designers, actors and models gathered for decades. The result is a hotel where bathing, music, fashion, art and hospitality form successive chapters of the same address.
What you should know about Les Bains Paris.
Les Bains Paris is best known for beginning in 1885 as Les Bains Guerbois, the private bathing establishment founded by François-Auguste Guerbois with his son and constructed by architect Eugène Ewald, attracting Belle Époque figures including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Claude Monet and Édouard Manet before the building entered an entirely different cultural era. In 1978, the property became Les Bains Douches, combining a rock concert venue, restaurant and nightclub with interiors by the then-young Philippe Starck, whose black-and-white checkerboard dance floor became synonymous with the club. Joy Division performed there on December 18, 1979, a concert subsequently preserved as Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979, while later programming included Depeche Mode, Prince and Simple Minds and the rooms drew figures including Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Catherine Deneuve, Jack Nicholson, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. After structural problems forced the club's closure, Jean-Pierre Marois, whose family had owned the building since the 1970s, took control of its revival and commissioned architect Vincent Bastie, Tristan Auer, Denis Montel and creative director Alexandre Kellas for its conversion. Les Bains reopened in March 2015 as a five-star hotel with 39 rooms and suites, restaurant and bar, spa, performance programming and a reconstructed swimming pool, preserving an address whose hospitality and nightlife history then stretched across 130 years.
Jean-Pierre Marois extended the 2015 revival beyond the hotel by resurrecting Les Bains Guerbois as a fragrance house in 2016, beginning with Eau de Cologne and the Atmosphère candle before developing perfumes conceived around specific years and episodes from the Rue du Bourg-l'Abbé address. Futura 2000 contributes another layer of the property's continuing relationship with visual culture through a mural overlooking La Verrière, while the surviving 1885 water reservoir rises 15 meters above a 15-square-meter footprint and contains a suspended installation by Berlin artist Joachim Sauter. Les Bains Guerbois Spa reconnects the contemporary hotel with François-Auguste Guerbois's original bathing premise through a vitality pool equipped with counter-current swimming, massage jets, bubble jets and a waterfall, accompanied by a hammam and treatment program. Together, Jean-Pierre Marois, Futura 2000, Joachim Sauter and Les Bains Guerbois demonstrate how the property continues developing its original cultural DNA through fragrance, contemporary art and bathing while MICHELIN Guide recognition with One MICHELIN Key places the 39-room hotel within Paris's distinguished contemporary hospitality landscape.
How to fold Les Bains Paris into your trip.
Les Bains Paris works as the anchor for an afternoon exploring the artistic experimentation, invention and collecting culture surrounding the northern Marais.
Begin at Musée des Arts et Métiers, rooted in Henri Grégoire's 1794 creation of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and now displaying more than 2,400 inventions across collections devoted to scientific instruments, materials, energy, mechanics, construction, communication and transport. Continue to Centre Pompidou, where Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers won the 1971 international competition against 680 other entries before their glass-and-metal cultural complex opened in 1977, externalizing structure and circulation across a building extending through ten levels of 7,500 square meters each. Conclude at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, founded by François and Jacqueline Sommer and inaugurated by André Malraux in François Mansart's seventeenth-century Hôtel de Guénégaud on February 21, 1967 before expanding into Hôtel de Mongelas in 2007. The progression moves from centuries of technological invention through rebellious twentieth-century architecture into an intensely authored private collection, creating a cultural sequence suited to a hotel whose own history repeatedly brought design, music, art and experimentation under one roof.
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