Villa-des-Prés

The house that stood at 29 rue de Buci before the present building was an inn in the 17th century. In 1905 the Paris lawyer Paul Fromageot published that house's history as part of a house-by-house study of rue de Buci. He found the inn trading under the sign of La Ville de Marseille and later La Ville de Stockolm, as he spells it. A Paris address book of 1692, the Livre commode des adresses de Paris, noted that guests ate there at a shared table for 15 sols a head.^[1]

From 1695 the house belonged to the family of Pierre-Jean Cherré, a senior official of the Chambre des comptes, the royal audit court. His heirs leased the whole house to the innkeeper of La Ville de Stockolm. By 1753 the tenant was Denis Pougny, a wine merchant, who had given the house a new sign, La Raquette ("The Racket"). According to Fromageot, the racket was a rallying sign for local players of jeu de paume, an early form of tennis.^[1]

In 1767 Joseph Gravet, a wine merchant who already ran his business in the house, bought it for 40,000 livres. The house stayed with wine merchants: the Berquier family bought it in 1791, and Thouvenin and Ronot in 1823. In 1823 the house was numbered 35 and was the home of Julien-Marie Jouanin, an engraver of medals and gems who had won the Grand Prix de Rome, a French state prize for young artists, in 1809. The descendants of Thouvenin and Ronot put the house up for auction in 1903, and on 22 December one of the heirs bought it for 172,000 francs.^[1]

In 1905 a large bouillon, a type of low-priced Paris restaurant, filled the ground floor and the first floor. A photograph taken for the Union Photographique Française in 1906, now in the Musée Carnavalet, shows the old house with the sign "Grand Bouillon Restaurant" and the name E. Hennebuisse.^[1][2]

The present stone building dates from the early 1910s. The hotel's press kit says it has been an apartment building since 1911, and the building database of Apur, the Paris urban planning agency, gives 1912 as its year of construction. According to the 2018 application for the hotel's building permit, the building has a ground floor and seven upper floors and held apartments above shops on the ground and first floors.^[2][5][3][4]

The City of Paris approved the conversion into a hotel in January 2020. The permit covered digging a second basement level for a swimming pool, building a terrace in the courtyard and adding two elevators. The hotel says the work took three years. Villa-des-Prés opened in December 2023, according to Le Figaro and Le Monde, and Atout France, the national tourism agency, classified it as a five-star hotel on 19 December 2023. Bruno Borrione, who trained at the École Boulle and worked for many years with the designer Philippe Starck, designed the interiors and most of the furniture. The gallery owner Amélie du Chalard commissioned about 50 abstract works from 11 French artists for the rooms and public spaces.^{[4][5][6][7][8]}