Le Grand Mazarin

Before Le Grand Mazarin, the building at 6 rue des Archives held the Villa Mazarin, a four-star hotel with 29 rooms. In January 2016 the trade paper L'Hôtellerie Restauration, citing Le Figaro, reported that Xavier Niel, founder of the telecoms company Free, and the brothers Patrick and Gérard Pariente, former owners of the clothing brand Naf Naf, had bought the Villa Mazarin's property, without the hotel business, for about €25 million. The Villa Mazarin's operating company, founded in 2004, was dissolved in September 2016. In March 2022 the travel magazine Yonder reported that the buildings, which had also housed a café called La Comète, had been under renovation for several years.^[2][1][3]

An archaeological survey made in 2018 suggests that two of the buildings on the site date from the second half of the 19th century. Before a second basement level was dug, the City of Paris archaeology department opened six small test pits in the cellars of 4 rue des Archives and 17 rue de la Verrerie. The archaeologist Paul Celly recorded 19 pits and other underground features. Seven are medieval, the earliest from the first half of the 6th century and the latest from the late 13th or early 14th century. The most recent are latrines from the second half of the 19th century, which Paul Celly judged were probably built at the same time as the buildings now standing. The hotel's website calls the property a 14th-century building.^[4][6][5]

Le Grand Mazarin opened in September 2023 as the fourth hotel of Maisons Pariente and its first in Paris, after Crillon le Brave in Provence (2018) and Lou Pinet in Saint-Tropez and Le Coucou in Méribel (both 2019). Patrick Pariente founded the group with his daughters Leslie Kouhana and Kimberley Cohen. At the opening, the trade paper HR-Infos reported that Patrick Pariente, Gérard Pariente and Xavier Niel owned the three buildings and that Maisons Pariente ran the hotel.^[6][7]

Martin Brudnizki, whose design studio MBDS is in London, has said that the old-fashioned literary salon and its hostesses, the salonnières, were one of his main inspirations for the interiors. Nearly 500 works of art hang in the hotel, according to the design magazine Sleeper, and the art curator was Amélie du Chalard. The fresco of flowers and trees over the pool, Le regard de Narcisse, is by the painter Jacques Merle and takes the Greek myth of Narcissus as its theme. Jacques Merle worked on it for almost a year, two months of it on site. The artist Sophia Pega designed the winter garden, whose twelve windows are inspired by tarot cards. The street windows show a changing series of installations by emerging artists, which the hotel calls La Grande Manufacture.^{[8][6][9][10][11][12]}