On a recent week-long Paris vacation, my family and I did what we felt we were both privileged and obligated to do: We threw ourselves headlong into the city. We walked! We dined! We made our way through museums and parks and puppet shows and up and down early morning and late-night boulevards, stopping along the way for everything from sugary breakfast waffles to champagne or espresso (grownups) and gelato (kids) nightcaps! In short, we joyfully exhausted ourselves, day after day and evening after evening.
And then we did something really smart: For a respite from—and amidst—it all, we checked ourselves in the Saint James hotel for a few gorgeous days of sumptuous, sun-kissed rest and relaxation.
Tucked away in Paris’s quiet, leafy 16th arrondissement—just a few steps away from Avenue Foch and a short walk from the haute shopping end of the Champs-Élysées—the building that now houses the Saint James was built in 1892 at the direction of the widow of the former French president Adolphe Thiers to house scholarship students from the Thiers Foundation. Students—only 15 at a time—had the run of this gorgeous neoclassical building for a term of three years. Later, the building and surrounding 50,000-square feet of gardens became a private club, and since 1991 it has functioned as a hotel—now part of the Relais & Château collection—while continuing to host club members.
Just prior to our arrival, the entire property—which now features 50 rooms and suites, including duplexes and two ground-floor suites with terraces—had been reimagined and updated by French interior designer Laura Gonzalez, who kept all that was wonderful about the place, from the bones to its stately 19th century tiling, while imparting a brighter, more playful vibe to the grandeur with geometric patterning, Versailles parquets, and Art Deco touches, artfully juggling styles and textures and colors. (Gonzalez also made ample use of homegrown talent, bringing together fabrics by Maison Pierre Frey and Le Manach, frescoes and plasterwork by Sofrastyl and Atelier Roma, custom rugs by Pinton, and lighting from Patrice Dangel and Jean Roger Paris.)
Thankfully un-reimagined and un-updated: Pilou, the hotel’s almost ecstatically languid house cat, who sleep-walked through the lobby and up and down the grand staircases—but who seemed most at home in the Saint James’ library bar. (That “library” tag isn’t a mere bookish-lifestyle affectation: drinks are served between walls of double-height bookshelves stocked with the same books that educated those fortunate Thiers Foundation scholars more than a century ago.)
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. After checking ourselves in amidst the Saint James’ soaring, frescoed lobby on a weekday morning—even Pilou, frankly, made us feel welcome somehow, which is saying something for a cat—did we hurriedly toss our suitcases into our airy, sun-filled room (where a large porcelain vase on a small pedestal in a prominent position seemed almost pre-ordained to be smashed to small bits, at great familial expense, before our stay here came to an end) and rush out to continue our grand march through this spectacular city?
Reader, we did no such thing. I had an appointment at the hotel’s subterranean Guerlain spa, where an aesthetician cleaned, oxygenated, and otherwise soothed my face in a kind of dim-lit, ambient-soundtracked heaven, while my wife and children made a beeline for the hotel’s hammam, sauna, and naturally lit pool (an amazing feat, given that said pool is essentially on the cellar level)—opened just days before we arrived.
Don’t get me wrong: We didn’t give up on Paris—we simply gathered our strength for a bit. Once fortified and restored, we did set out again, and again—both to old standbys (we introduced the kids to the cabinet of curiosities that is Deyrolle, which they adored) and to new discoveries (of which Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature de Paris—an exquisitely curated wonderland of animalia and art, also recently renovated, was the standout). We just high-tailed it back home to the Saint James with glee when we were finished with the goings-out.
On our final night—both in Paris and at the Saint James—my wife and I bribed our children with chocolate and room service and let Netflix put them to bed while we dined at Bellefeuille, the hotel’s newly Michelin-starred restaurant helmed by the acclaimed Julien Dumas (formerly of the also-Michelin-starred Lucas Carton across town). IKSEL wallpapers printed with delicate greenery brought the hotel’s 50,000 square feet of gardens inside as we gloried in a tasting menu that started with asparagus and green olives (vegetables are grown in the hotel’s organic garden south of Paris and brought to the Saint James by electric van; honey, meanwhile, comes from hives on property), moved through brown trout with wild garlic, swimming crab with citrus fruits and seaweed, lobster with smoked chili pepper, cuttlefish with squid ink, and salt meadow lamb before serenading us into the evening with desserts of rhubarb and sweet clover—and Ecuadorian dark chocolate served with tansy, a kind of European flowering aster plant.
Words honestly fail me here (a problem, frankly, when making your living as a writer). Suffice to say that my wife and I saw, course by course, our ecstasy supplanted by surprise, exaltation, wonderment, intrigue, gratitude and, finally, awe. Suffice also to say that if you’re staying here and don’t splurge on such a dinner, the staff should be authorized to level an Olympic-sized amount of that infamous Parisian froideur in your direction. (And if you’re staying elsewhere in Paris, it’s well worth an Uber over for it.)
Before we paid our respects to Dumas, who we saw working through the kitchen’s open doors throughout our dinner, Pilou wandered among the dinner crowd. For a brief moment, I caught myself wondering what a château cat at a Paris hotel with a Michelin-starred chef in residence ate for dinner—but I did the right thing and snapped out of it, gave my compliments to the chef, and slept the sleep of the gods.
On our final morning, we feasted on French pastries and eggs, we swam, we steamed in the hammam, we swam some more. We packed up and successfully exited the room without shattering that vase on a small pedestal in a prominent position. We ordered an ad hoc fish-and-chips for my daughter’s early lunch and watched her eat it on the pergola-covered patio in back of the hotel, surrounded by the garden. And then we steeled ourselves and hired a car to take us back into the fray again.
When my wife and I dined, we briefly chatted pleasantries with an older couple at the table next to us. When the obvious question of where they were from rolled around, we were surprised to hear that, though they lived in Paris, they came to the Saint James for a kind of bucolic escape when the world—or the city—was too much. And then we realized that we’d done much the same, though we didn’t exactly want to escape Paris—we just wanted to elevate it.