Why you should experience Select Hotel in Paris, France.
Select Hotel is an art-filled boutique hotel where Latin Quarter's intellectual heritage, eighteenth-century architecture, contemporary French design, and collecting culture create one of the Sorbonne quarter's most distinctive places to stay.
Set along Place de la Sorbonne near Rue de la Sorbonne and just steps from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the hotel places 65 individually configured rooms and suites behind an eighteenth-century stone façade, with a two-level glass atrium, winter garden, vaulted breakfast rooms, contemporary artwork, and designer furniture creating an unusually layered discussion between old Paris and contemporary interiors. Exposed beams and stonework remain visible beside polished granite, sculptural furniture, modern lighting, and an evolving art collection, while guestrooms look toward the Sorbonne, the square, Rue de la Sorbonne, or the internal garden. Lounges arranged around the atrium turn circulation into gallery-like space, allowing paintings and sculpture to remain integrated with reading, breakfast, drinks, and quieter moments throughout the property. The result is a hotel where centuries of Left Bank architecture become the structure for contemporary art and highly individualized Parisian design.
What you should know about Select Hotel.
Select Hotel is best known for transforming an eighteenth-century cut-stone building into a 65-room, four-star design hotel while preserving exposed period stone, wooden beams, vaulted subterranean rooms, and the historic façade within an interior organized around a grand glass-covered atrium extending across two levels. The winter garden beneath that glass roof incorporates a cactus garden and a grand installation by artist Lorant Waald, while balcony-like lounges surround the atrium and a sequence of stone and granite passages descends toward eighteenth-century vaulted breakfast rooms recalling the cellar architecture historically associated with the Left Bank. Contemporary furniture by internationally recognized Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola creates the principal discussion with the preserved fabric, placing modern forms beside eighteenth-century masonry rather than treating the building's historical shell as background decoration. The 65 accommodations continue that individualized approach without standardized layouts, combining exclusively designed furniture with exposed stone and beams across categories beginning around 12 square meters and extending to rooms and junior suites oriented toward the winter garden, Place de la Sorbonne, Rue de la Sorbonne, or the university itself.
Richard Orlinski extends the property's contemporary collection through sculpture displayed alongside paintings and furniture, connecting Select Hotel with a French artist whose highly polished geometric works have developed an international presence across galleries, hospitality spaces, and public exhibitions. Daniel Gastaud adds another strand through works incorporated into the hotel's artistic circuit, while illustrator and artist Hippolyte Romain broadens that collection beyond sculpture into a multidisciplinary program that the property explicitly presents as an evolving journey through contemporary art. Lorant Waald gives that program architectural scale through the grand work traversing the glass atrium, physically integrating art with the two-story winter garden rather than confining the collection to guestrooms or conventional wall displays. Together, Patricia Urquiola, Richard Orlinski, Daniel Gastaud, Hippolyte Romain, and Lorant Waald explain how Select Hotel has built a recognizable character from the intersection of eighteenth-century fabric, collectible contemporary design, painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation.
How to fold Select Hotel into your trip.
Select Hotel works as an afternoon and evening tracing the scholarly and artistic traditions of Latin Quarter.
Begin at Musée de Cluny, where medieval sculpture, stained glass, tapestries, Roman baths, and the celebrated Lady and the Unicorn cycle establish the extraordinary historical depth underlying the intellectual district that developed around the Sorbonne. Continue to Select Hotel, where eighteenth-century masonry, Patricia Urquiola furniture, Lorant Waald's atrium installation, and the wider contemporary collection turn the neighborhood's discussion between inherited culture and new ideas into the centerpiece of the stay. Continue to Collège de France, where a scholarly institution founded under François I carries the sequence into nearly five centuries of research and public teaching, deepening the connection between the hotel and the academic culture surrounding Place de la Sorbonne. Conclude at Cinéma du Panthéon, where one of Paris' historic art-house cinemas provides the evening payoff through independent filmmaking and cinephile culture rooted in the intellectual traditions of the Left Bank. The progression moves from medieval material culture through contemporary hotel design and centuries of scholarship before culminating in independent cinema, revealing the enduring intellectual creativity that defines Latin Quarter.
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