Why you should experience mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation in Paris, France.
mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation is a cinematic boutique hotel where Nation's kinetic character, eastern Parisian film culture, independent creative inheritance and enduring appetite for experimentation converge inside the world's first cinema-hotel.
Set along Boulevard Diderot near Avenue du Trône and just steps from Place de la Nation, the hotel rises directly above mk2 Nation within a purpose-built cinema and hospitality complex conceived by Nathanaël and Elisha Karmitz after more than six years of development. DVVD architects Daniel Vaniche and Paula Castro shaped the building around the relationship between screen and city, while Alix Thomsen designed interiors in which beds face three-meter projection screens and guestrooms become private screening rooms within seconds. The property extends that premise through two Cinema Suites with dedicated theaters, six mk2 Nation screens below, a private projection box, karaoke room, modular Loft and rooftop equipped for open-air screenings above Paris. The result is a hotel where architecture, film exhibition and private accommodation operate as one continuous cinematic environment shaped by the Karmitz family's decades-long commitment to independent cinema.
What you should know about mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation.
mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation is best known for opening in March 2021 as the world's first cinema-hotel, extending the Paradiso concept developed by Nathanaël and Elisha Karmitz after their Cinéma Paradiso festivals filled the Grand Palais in 2013 and 2015 before moving to the Louvre's Cour Carrée in 2019. The hotel was conceived over more than six years as an extension of mk2, the film group founded by their father Marin Karmitz in 1974, and integrated with a comprehensive reconstruction of mk2 Nation completed by DVVD Architectes under Daniel Vaniche and Jean-Christophe Denise after the cinema closed for work in January 2018. DVVD's 2,035-square-meter cinema project, delivered in 2019 following €6.2 million of work, expanded the existing complex vertically to R+7, while the architecture translated cinema directly into the façade through bow windows proportioned like 16:9 screens and guestrooms geometrically organized toward their own projection surfaces. The hotel introduced 34 rooms and two Cinema Suites, equipping accommodation with laser projectors and three-meter-wide screens while connecting the property directly to mk2 Nation, whose current six auditoriums provide 531 seats, laser projection and 5.1 or 7.1 sound. A wider creative team turned that technical program into a cultural project through Alix Thomsen's decoration, Sarah Kahn's artistic direction, Philippe Collet's lighting, Christian Boltanski, JR and Ruben Brulat's commissioned art, Alexandre Mattiussi of AMI's staff wardrobe and original soundtrack contributions from Woodkid and Gaspard Augé.
JR deepened the relationship between film and architecture through two 15-meter-high photographic collages installed across the inner courtyard façades, works visible principally from courtyard-facing guestrooms and conceived as tributes to classics of cinema history. Christian Boltanski and Ruben Brulat extended Sarah Kahn's artistic program through installations inside the property, while Alix Thomsen's guestrooms incorporate furniture and cinematic references within spaces engineered by DVVD around the unusual concept that the projection screen should command the room's geometry. Trois Couleurs, mk2's cinema magazine, carries the curatorial character onto the screens through selections distributed across services including MyCanal, mk2 Curiosity, Netflix, Prime Video, Carlotta Films, Mubi and Arte, while the Cinema Suites can screen films currently playing theatrically. Together, JR, Christian Boltanski, Alix Thomsen, Trois Couleurs and the Karmitz brothers make mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation an unusually complete expression of mk2's philosophy, joining filmmaking, exhibition, criticism, architecture, contemporary art and hospitality within the same Boulevard Diderot address.
How to fold mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation into your trip.
mk2 Hotel Paradiso Nation works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the architecture, archives and institutions that have shaped cinema culture across eastern Paris.
Begin at Cinémathèque française, founded in 1936 by Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, Jean Mitry and Paul Auguste Harlé to collect, preserve and exhibit films before moving in September 2005 into Frank Gehry's building at 51 Rue de Bercy, where its collections now extend across films, costumes, posters, cameras, drawings and more than 33,000 archival files. Continue to Palais de la Porte Dorée, designed principally by Albert Laprade between 1929 and 1931 for the International Colonial Exposition, where architecture, furniture, decorative art and the Tropical Aquarium preserve a complex physical record of the cultural and political narratives promoted by the exposition. Conclude at Place de la Nation, whose history reaches to Louis XIV's ceremonial entry in 1660 and whose surviving columns originated with Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's 1787 Barrière du Trône before the square received its present name on July 14, 1880. The progression moves from France's institutional preservation of film through the visual culture of a major twentieth-century exhibition into the historic square beside Hotel Paradiso, creating a sequence that places mk2's contemporary experiment within the broader cultural history of eastern Paris.
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