J.K. Place Paris

Before it became a hotel, 82 rue de Lille was a group of office buildings, two to five stories high plus attics, on the street and around two courtyards. The City of Paris granted a permit to renovate the offices in 2011. A plan to turn them into 17 apartments was refused in 2012, and a revised plan for 19 apartments was approved in 2014.^[1]

In October 2016 the City approved a different project: converting the offices into a 29-room hotel. The permit allowed the basement to be dug out and extended for a pool, the courtyard roofs to be replaced with verandas, and a paved courtyard and a garden to be laid out. A revised permit granted in December 2020 added a fountain in the first courtyard.^[1]

J.K. Place Paris opened in late November 2019. It was the first hotel outside Italy for J.K. Place, which the hotelier Ori Kafri started in Florence in 2003. The letters J.K. stand for Ori Kafri's father, Jonathan Kafri. In their coverage of the opening, Robb Report described the building as a former European consulate, and Travel + Leisure called it a former government building.^[2][3]

The Florentine architect Michele Bönan designed the interiors, as he had for the J.K. Place hotels in Florence, Capri and Rome. According to Travel + Leisure, Bönan and his team collected furniture and objects at Paris markets once a month for more than three years, and an Italian firm made copies of some of the pieces they found. When the hotel opened, the glass-enclosed courtyard restaurant became an outpost of the Miami restaurant Casa Tua in the evenings. The restaurant is now called Il Ristorante J.K. Place Paris.^[3][2][4]

A plaque at 82 rue de l'Université, about 270 meters from the hotel, marks the building where the poet Alphonse de Lamartine lived from 1837 to 1853. A 2020 article in L'Express placed Lamartine's 19th-century home at 82 rue de Lille instead.^[5][6]