Les Jardins du Faubourg

Rue d'Aguesseau was opened in 1723 on land owned by Joseph-Antoine d'Aguesseau, an honorary councilor of the Parlement of Paris, a royal law court, and is named after him. It runs 175 meters from rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to rue de Surène.^[1]

The British admiral Sir Sidney Smith defended the port of Acre, now Akko in Israel, against Napoleon Bonaparte's army in 1799 and spent his later years mainly in Paris. He died at his home at No. 9 rue d'Aguesseau on 26 May 1840, according to his obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine. The date of the present building has not been established, so it is not known whether Smith lived in it.^[2][3]

In the 1920s several people, companies and a consulate gave No. 9 as their address. Germain Bapst, a historian of the French crown jewels, is listed there in a May 1920 membership list of the Société de l'histoire de l'art français, an art-history society. The painter Georges Maroniez, a former magistrate, gave the same address when he joined the Société française de photographie in 1923.^[4][5]

A newly formed rubber company, the Société Chimique du Caoutchouc, had its head office at No. 9 in 1921, and a new hydroelectric company gave the address in 1929. The 1924 Baedeker travel guide to Paris listed No. 9 as the Cuban consulate, and in 1925 Cuba's consul general, Louis Fernandez-Vallin, gave the same address.^[6][7][8][9]

In 2014 the building had a ground floor, three upper floors and an attic over one basement level, and held offices and apartments. That July the City of Paris approved a permit to turn it into a hotel and to build an extension with a ground floor and one upper floor over two basement levels. The company that runs the hotel, Hotel Daguesseau, was registered at the address in June 2015.^[10][11][12]

Les Jardins du Faubourg opened in spring 2019, according to its website at the time. When it opened, the chef was Bruno Doucet, and the spa offered a treatment menu by the Paris masseur Olivier Lecocq. Today the restaurant is Il Giardino, which serves Italian food, and the spa works with the Japanese beauty brand Shiseido. The hotel describes its building as a former Haussmann-era town house.^{[13][14][15][16]}