Hôtel Particulier Montmartre

Avenue Junot was cut between 1909 and 1912 through the "maquis" of Montmartre, a hillside of shacks where rag-pickers, scrap dealers and artists who could not afford a studio lived. It is named after Andoche Junot, a Napoleonic general.^[1][2]

The hotel occupies a house set back from avenue Junot, at the top of a private stepped lane that runs from 65 rue Lepic to 23 avenue Junot. The lane is known as the Passage de la Sorcière, the witch's passage. According to Montmartre legend, a rock in the lane, the remains of an old fountain, was called La Sourcière (from source, a spring). Local children turned the name into Sorcière, meaning witch, because a very old woman lived alone in the house that is now the hotel. No record supports the story.^[2][3]

The Comtet family, who own the house and run it as the hotel, say it was built in 1871 and first belonged to the Hermès family, founders of the Paris luxury-goods house. In 2026 the travel guide Yonder dated the house to 1891 instead. No archive record confirms either date or the Hermès ownership. The Comtets bought the house in 2007 and opened it as a guesthouse, and their son Oscar Comtet later took over its management.^[4][5]

Avenue Junot filled with artists' houses in the 1920s. At number 15, the architect Adolf Loos built a house in 1926 for the writer Tristan Tzara and the painter Greta Knutson. At number 12, the painters Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo and Valadon's husband André Utter lived from 1926.^[6][1]