Maison Proust

Rue de Picardie is named after the French province of Picardy. The city's street register links the name to the place de France, a square planned nearby under King Henri IV. The stretch where number 26 stands was once part of the place de la Rotonde du Temple. The square took its name from the Rotonde du Temple, a round building of shops put up in 1788 inside the former walled compound of the Knights Templar. The city renamed this stretch rue de Picardie in February 1877 and numbered its even side that May.^[1][2]

City planning files show a hotel in the building by 2003, with a shop on the ground and first floors. The city refused a plan to rearrange the building in January 2004, then granted a permit in July 2004 that turned the shop into three more hotel rooms. The Association Marais-Louvre, a residents' group, wrote in May 2023 that the site had once held a café and apartments.^[3][4]

In January 2016 the hotel at number 26 was the Hôtel Picard, a two-star hotel that advertised inexpensive rooms. A permit granted in September 2017 covered a full rehabilitation of the building: a raised attic floor, a planted roof terrace, the closing-in of the small inner courtyard, a restored street façade and a new shopfront. A change to that permit, granted in August 2021, added a second basement for equipment and two more rooms.^[5][3]

The company behind the hotel, Maison Proust SAS, was founded on 11 June 2019 and has had its head office at 26 rue de Picardie since January 2021. The hotel's founders, Sylviane Sanz and Yoni Aïdan, already ran Maison Souquet, a hotel near Montmartre, under their hotel group, Collection Maisons Particulières. They asked the decorator Jacques Garcia, who had designed Maison Souquet, to design the interiors. After three years of work, the hotel was about to open when Time Out Paris toured it on 21 December 2022, and the travel magazine Yonder reported its opening on 9 January 2023. Atout France, the national tourism agency, gave it five stars on 1 March 2023.^{[6][7][10][11][12]}

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) never lived at this address, and the hotel does not claim that he visited it. His main Paris homes were 9 boulevard Malesherbes, 45 rue de Courcelles and 102 boulevard Haussmann, all in the 8th arrondissement. In 1919 he moved to 44 rue de l'Amiral-Hamelin in the 16th. In his later years he often dined at the Hôtel Ritz. The founders built the hotel's art collection around Proust. The hotel says it includes a signed copy of his novel, a letter from Proust to Princess Soutzo, a portrait of Proust by Jacques Aymer de la Chevalerie, and paintings and prints by Jacques-Émile Blanche, Jean Béraud, Giovanni Boldini, Léon Bonnat and Madeleine Lemaire, whose Tuesday salon Proust attended.^{[7][8][9][13]}