Experimental Marais

Rue du Temple is named after the Temple, the Paris base of the Knights Templar, a medieval military and religious order. The street led to it, and a deed of 1235 already names it after the order. Rue Chapon, opposite the hotel, takes its name from a 13th-century resident recorded as Robert Bégon or Capon. The hotel restaurant, Temple & Chapon, is named after these streets.^[1][10]

The building was an office block before it became a hotel. Apur, the Paris urban planning agency, places its construction between 1940 and 1967 without giving a year. When the city granted a permit on February 25, 2016, to turn it into a hotel, it had a ground floor and three upper floors over two basement levels. The plans added three floors and changed the façades and the roof. A revised permit, granted in June 2019, reduced the planned rooms from 65 to 43, added a pool, removed the balconies and renovated all the façades.^[2][3]

The hotel opened in the summer of 2019 as Sinner, the third Paris hotel of the Evok Collection group after Nolinski and Brach. The interior designer Tristan Auer gave it a monastic theme, with stained glass, a candlelit crypt used as a shop, red doors with knockers, and staff uniforms that recalled a priest's cassock. Tristan Auer said in 2019 that the idea came from rue du Temple's link with the Knights Templar. The spa had an indoor pool modeled on Greek and Roman baths.^[4][5][6]

On October 4, 2024, Evok Collection and its parent company, Zaka Investissement, announced the sale of Sinner to Experimental Group. Evok said it wanted to concentrate on its Nolinski and Brach hotels. Experimental Group began in 2007 with the Experimental Cocktail Club bar in Paris. Its co-founder Olivier Bon said the group bought Sinner in the autumn of 2024. The hotel opened as Experimental Marais on March 11, 2025.^{[7][8][10][9]}

Experimental Group brought Tristan Auer back for the redesign. He reworked the public spaces in a neo-Gothic style with arches, stained glass and brown and sepia tones. The hotel says the visual artist Clovis Retif invented an imaginary traveler, Henri Evelyn Marcel, whose souvenirs and artworks are placed throughout the building. Olivier Bon said the rooms were in very good condition. The rooms kept their design and received new bed linen, towels and bathroom products. Sinner's restaurant became Temple & Chapon, with the chef Mélanie Serre, and the American Bar was added.^[10][8][11]