Hôtel Thérèse

Rue Thérèse was once two streets. The hotel stands on the eastern section, the older one, which runs from rue de Richelieu to rue Sainte-Anne. A 1622 rent roll of the Archbishopric of Paris already lists it as the rue du Hasard. Hasard is French for chance, and Félix de Rochegude's 1903 guide to old Paris says the street was named after a gaming house. The hotel's own account says the street had many of them.^[1][2][3][7]

The western section was opened in 1667, when a hill called the Butte des Moulins was leveled. It was named after Queen Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV, only after her death, and until 1692 the whole street was still called the rue du Hasard. An order of 23 October 1880 merged the rue du Hasard into rue Thérèse. A second order that December renumbered only the western section, so the houses on the hotel's section kept their old numbers. In 1890 the draftsman Jules-Adolphe Chauvet still used the old name when he drew a carved oak door at "5 rue du Hasard", the hotel's present number.^[1][2][6]

Across the street from the hotel, at 6 and 6bis rue Thérèse and 39 rue de Richelieu, stand two town houses begun in 1663 for Antoine Le Menestrel, a counselor to the King. Rochegude identified no. 6 as the former gaming house, the "tripot du Hazard", and as the Hôtel de Séguier of 1750, the home of Antoine-Louis Séguier, advocate-general at the Parlement of Paris. A photograph of the house by the photographer Eugène Atget, taken between 1907 and 1927, carries the same description. Parts of the houses, including façades, roofs and staircases, were listed as a historic monument in 1996.^[4][3][5]

The hotel says its building dates from the 18th century. Magazine articles from April to June 2002 describe the Hôtel Thérèse as a formerly sleepy three-star hotel, newly renovated by the hotelier Sylvie de Lattre. It was her second hotel, after Le Verneuil on the Left Bank. In 2002 the hotel's website listed 40 rooms, 3 junior suites and a seminar room, and in January 2012 it still described a three-star hotel with 43 rooms.^{[7][8][9][10][11]}

By mid-2012 the website announced a redesign by the interior designer Jean-Louis Deniot, with a new open ground floor and deliberately faded colors and fabrics that mixed a 20th-century vintage look with the feel of a loft. Deniot had also redesigned Hôtel Récamier on place Saint-Sulpice for Sylvie de Lattre. By January 2017 the website described Hôtel Thérèse as a four-star hotel. Today the de Lattre family also runs Hôtel Récamier and, near the Grands Boulevards, Hôtel Adèle & Jules.^{[12][10][13][7][14]}