Hôtel La Tamise

Rue d'Alger was laid out in the early 1830s across the site of the former Hôtel de Noailles, an aristocratic mansion whose grounds also covered what is now 212 and 214 rue de Rivoli. The City of Paris street register names the developers as the Périer brothers and Chéronnet. The street was first called rue Louis-Philippe-Ier, after the king who had come to the throne in 1830, and took its present name in 1832 in memory of the capture of Algiers by the French army on 5 July 1830. A royal ordinance of 16 November 1834 limited the houses along it to 16 meters in height.^[1][2]

City planning data dates the house at number 4 to the period 1801 to 1850 and records a rehabilitation in 2015. Esprit de France, the group that runs the hotel, says the house was built in the middle of the 19th century and had belonged to the Noailles family. The hotel's previous owners said on their website in 2004 that it had been a residence of the dukes of Noailles and of Marshal Patrice de Mac Mahon, President of France from 1873 to 1879. The street itself was opened on the site of the former Noailles mansion, so the house was built after that mansion had gone.^{[3][11][10][1]}

The Paris trade directory, the Didot-Bottin, lists a Hôtel de la Tamise at 4 rue d'Alger from its 1876 edition, first under a proprietor named Corbin, then under Jouannet and Deutsch in 1878 and 1879, and under Gustave Jorger from 1881 to 1885. The hotel itself dates its opening to 1878 and says its first guests were British visitors on the Grand Tour. "La Tamise" is the French name for the River Thames, and the hotel says the name refers to those British travelers. The hotel also says that the models of the couturier Madame Grès, the British model Twiggy in the 1970s and the fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier stayed in later decades.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9]}

Esprit de France, a hotel group owned by the Compagnie Lebon, took over the hotel in 2013 and closed it for about a year of works. It had reopened by December 2014 as a four-star hotel with 19 rooms. The interior designer Cybèle Paluel-Marmont led the renovation. The group's press release names the craftsmen: the workshop Les Passeurs de Lumière restored the stained-glass windows over the street, Salvatore Abramo restored the cement floor tiles, the mosaic artist Mathilde Jonquière made the bathroom friezes, and the artist Isabelle de Borchgrave contributed a folded-paper work. The Charles X-period staircase with its marquetry, the ground-floor fireplace and a period mirror were kept, and an elevator was built to serve the five floors.^[13][11][12]

Atout France classified the hotel with four stars on 31 May 2022, listing 19 rooms for 38 guests. In July 2025 Esprit de France, which already owned the hotel business, announced that it had bought a 52% share of the building's walls. The group said at the time that the hotel's occupancy had averaged 90% in recent years.^[14][13]