Château Voltaire

Rue Saint-Roch is named after the church of Saint-Roch, which it runs alongside. The hotel's end of the street was a lane called ruelle Michaut Riegnaut in 1495 and rue Gaillon in 1578, and it became rue Saint-Roch in the 17th century. An order of 16 August 1879 gave the same name to the southern section, which until then was rue du Dauphin.^[1]

The hotel occupies two plots: 55 rue Saint-Roch, and a larger corner plot numbered 57 rue Saint-Roch, 42 rue de la Sourdière and 1 rue Gomboust. The corner building's age is uncertain. In 1982 the Commission du Vieux Paris, the city's heritage advisory body, examined a plan to demolish the building and dated it to the 17th century. The French Ministry of Culture dates it to the early 19th century. The hotel describes its premises as three houses of the 17th and 18th centuries.^[2][7][3][8]

The corner building's shop grilles and its shop sign, "A la Coquille d'Or" (At the Golden Shell), have been listed as a historic monument since 3 December 1962. The listing does not cover the façades. The photographer Eugène Atget took pictures of the sign. The Musée Carnavalet holds one of his prints, dated 1908, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds two more. The hotel calls the shell a 16th-century motif and named its cocktail bar, La Coquille d'Or, after it.^[3][4][5][6]

Zadig & Voltaire, the fashion brand that Thierry Gillier founded in Paris in 1997, had its head office at 55-57 rue Saint-Roch by April 2009 and stayed until July 2016, when it moved to 11 avenue d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement. In September 2021 the travel magazine Yonder reported that the offices had become too small for the brand and that joining three buildings into one hotel had taken four years.^[9][10][11]

The company that runs the hotel was registered in July 2019 and is headed by ZV Holding, the Zadig & Voltaire holding company. The hotel opened in October 2021. The artistic director Franck Durand led the project, the Paris architecture duo Festen designed the interiors, and the landscape designer Louis Benech designed the terrace garden. The name comes from the fashion brand Zadig & Voltaire, not from the writer Voltaire, and the word "Château" is a nod to the Château Marmont hotel in Los Angeles.^{[12][14][15][13][16][17][11]}