Les Bains Paris

Rue du Bourg-l'Abbé takes its name from the Bourg-l'Abbé, a medieval settlement that belonged to the abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. In 1885 François-Auguste Guerbois and his son opened the Bains Guerbois at number 7, a private bathhouse. Its entrance porch, flanked by naiads, still stands, and a sign beside it, photographed in 2010, advertised steam baths, a pool, Turkish and Russian baths, sulfur showers and massage.^{[1][8][3][12][2]}

The Michelin Guide, the design magazine Metropolis and other accounts say this was the Auguste Guerbois who kept the Café Guerbois in Batignolles, where Édouard Manet and the painters who became the Impressionists met in the 1860s. The hotel, Le Figaro, Télérama and the Michelin Guide all say that Marcel Proust bathed here, and the hotel adds Émile Zola, Claude Monet and Manet. None of them cites a document from the period, so the names are a story the hotel and the press repeat, not an established fact.^{[3][4][10][12][6][8][15]}

By 1978 the building belonged to the father of Jean-Pierre Marois, the hotel's present owner, who had bought it from the Guerbois family. He leased it to Jacques Renault and Fabrice Coat, who opened the nightclub Les Bains Douches in December 1978 with a black-and-white tiled interior by the young designer Philippe Starck. The club booked punk and new-wave bands. Joy Division played on 18 December 1979, and nine songs from that night were released in 2001 as the album Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979. Dead Kennedys and Suicide also played there, and Télérama says Depeche Mode gave its first French concert in the club in 1981.^{[12][4][8][6][7][13][14]}

In 1984 Renault and Coat sold the business to Hubert Boukobza, who renamed the club Les Bains and ran it for 26 years. Le Figaro's list of its 1980s regulars includes Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Karl Lagerfeld, Grace Jones and Yves Saint Laurent. David Guetta was a resident DJ there before he was famous, the hotel says, and he and Cathy Guetta left the club in 2003.^{[6][12][16][11]}

On 28 May 2010 the Paris police prefecture closed the club after cracks appeared in the building. The prefecture said that undeclared work on load-bearing walls had put the public in danger, and a closure order followed on 2 June 2010. The club never reopened. Jean-Pierre Marois, a film producer who had inherited the building, created the Société des Bains in 2011 to turn it into a hotel. From January to April 2013 he lent the empty building to street artists chosen by the gallerist Magda Danysz. The architect Vincent Bastie led the renovation, and Tristan Auer and Denis Montel of the agency RDAI designed the interiors. Les Bains Paris opened on 24 March 2015, with the club in the basement. The decoration repeats Starck's black-and-white checkerboard, and the hotel says the nightclub's tiled pool was restored. In April 2024 the Michelin Guide gave the hotel one Michelin Key.^{[11][6][7][8][9][10][15][4][5]}