Dorothée Meilichzon is still in her early 30s and already has six hotel designs to her credit.
Photography by Karel Balas, courtesy of Chzon.
Meilichzon is a designer who never repeats herself, but her work has certain things in common: She loves to pick a historic period and riff on it, treats building materials as playthings, has a weakness for potent colors, and always styles beds with derring-do.
Set back from the street, the hotel—formerly used as an office building—is entered through a broad courtyard surrounded by plantings.
The courtyard’s herringbone brick is continued in the interior parquet of end-grain wood.
Aside from the ground-floor’s 16-foot ceilings and “a few plaster decorative elements,” the details are all new.
Chef Giovanni Passerini’s French-Italian Grand Restaurant is on the ground floor, as is The Shell, a moody cocktail bar, shown here.
The hallway carpeting mimics the old brickwork on the exterior of the building.
Each of the 50 guest rooms has lime plaster walls and custom-dyed linen draperies: materials and colors that reference the late 18th century and Marie Antoinette’s high-low tastes in particular.
The lime plaster appears in three custom-mixed period colors: dark blue, light gray-blue, and off-white/pale pink.
The wool-velvet headboards and cascading canopies are a play on classic French baldachin designs.
A nod to Marie Antoinette’s fantasy farm at Versailles: Rustic stools serve as bedside tables.
Meilichzon chose a rough linen for the canopies—”so it looks old.” It was custom stained by French fabric house Nobilis in dark green, light green, bright pink, and “the blue of the Parisian roofs.”
A compact room is fitted with a curtained backdrop. To make the tight space work, Meilichzon inset the bedside storage and used sconces and overhead lighting.
A scalloped console table holds the vintage-looking princess telephone, radio, and a cluster of bright potions from the bar.
In most cases, Meilichzon matched the headboard and curtain color.
Marbre corail, a red marble synonymous with Louis XVI (and sourced from Spain), appears throughout the hotel, here as a corner table that serves as the coffee station.
A small scalloped shelf is the perfect place for the room key.
The bathroom’s fanciful tiles were handmade for the hotel by Céramiques du Beaujolais, near Lyon.
Meilichzon alternated the colors used in the basket-weave pattern on the floor and applied a trellis design to the side of the tub.
A Meilichzon-designed banquette in one of the large guest rooms.
The designer in a rare moment of repose.