Far from the Eiffel Tower, a hip new hotel

By Mary Blume

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

PARIS: Gentrification takes many forms. A part of Pigalle has dubbed itself, perhaps not entirely happily, SoPig but, more interestingly, a savvy French group has opened a hotel in an offbeat part of Paris mingling casual trendiness with low rates. Open only a few weeks, it may give pause to such high-end New York hotel entrepreneurs as Robert De Niro of the very costly Greenwich or The Mercer's André Balazs. Rooms start at €79, or $108, per night.

The first Paris hotel to be designed from scratch by Philippe Starck, it was built by Roland Castro, architect of low-cost housing projects, under the aegis of Serge Trigano, whose father was a co-founder of Club Med. It is called Mama Shelter.

The name was chosen by Starck and by one of Trigano's sons, Trigano explained. "It suggests the mother who welcomes us and the impression that one is sheltered from the aggressions of the city. We wanted to create a kind of cocoon."

The cocoon is far from Paris's traditional center, in the northeastern 20th arrondissement, decidedly untouristic except for Père Lachaise cemetery. As part of the bobo movement to the city's low-cost east, the area is attracting a spillover from the now-overpriced Bastille, but it has a long way to go. "We are a quarter of an hour ahead of time," Trigano said.

The sprawling arrondissement combines charming mews houses and hideous housing projects, mama and papa shops and the restless young, an urgent need for renovation and such leafy pockets as La Campagne à Paris, a bunch of small villas built in 1906. The impression at times is almost of a mix of Chelsea in London and the South Bronx.

Mama Shelter is on a lot at 109 Rue de Bagnolet formerly occupied by a garage. It was discovered by an associate of Trigano's, Cyrille Aouizerate, who is a philosopher and real estate promoter, a combination possible only in France. He describes the hotel as a lay monastery or a modern kibbutz.

What Starck has wrought there is a fresh and welcoming mix of the hyper-modern and the cozy. Guests can check in at machines similar to those at airports (likewise taking a tip from the airlines, room rates vary according to how far in advance one books by credit card), but there is also a live staff to take bookings and dispense advice. At the end of the lobby is a small computer-equipped business center and along its side are vitrines variously decorated with Napoleon-style hats, backbackers' guides, telephone and computer accessories, Kiehl's lotions, DVDs, soft-porn books and pétanque balls to be used in an as-yet-unbuilt space.

The public rooms give onto a deck that overlooks disused railway tracks. They are cool and yet nestlike, with a huge eight-person foosball which encourages guests to mingle and a large video screen on which people can introduce themselves, Facebook-style, over a Caipirinha or a Coke. The bedrooms in Starck's usual black, gray and white are smoothly compact but not spare, with kitchenettes, quality linens, free Internet and showerheads as wide as dinner plates.

The impression is both laid back and solid. Trigano has recruited Alain Senderens of Lucas Carton to supervise the menu and Jean-Claude Elgaire, for 49 years concierge at the Plaza Athénée, to work with the staff, which is young, multinational and, Trigano said, for the most part inexperienced: "You may have to repeat your order a time or two but it doesn't matter. They are learning and they are very nice."

There is no fancy spa, though there will be a yoga room, and there is little of Starck's famous furniture in the public rooms because it is too costly. Trigano, who had not visited the 20th arrondissement before the project began, got the property cheap and figures his investment will be recouped in two or three years.

"The area is already moving - apartment space has nearly tripled in price since we began seven years ago, and it isn't as out of the way as it seems," he said. Mama Shelter is on the way in from Charles de Gaulle airport and from Villepinte, where immense trade shows are held, so it is attracting business people as well as tourists.

Right next to the hotel (which has a fashionably unmarked entrance), a mediathèque, also by Castro, will shortly open. Across the street is a popular nightspot called the Flèche d'Or, which Trigano's company owns so that if the racket from bands like Blackjoy or Apple Jelly or Ben'Bop is too loud for hotel guests the order will go out to cool it.

When Club Med was taken over and Trigano was ejected as president, he founded Serge Trigano & Sons, beginning with a travel agency and hotel and seminar management. Mama Shelter is the first hotel he owns and is a far cry from vacation villages, though he says they share the same values of gentillese and inclusiveness. "Here at night you'll have people from the neighborhood coming to play foosball with hotel guests. That wouldn't happen on the avenue Montaigne," he said.

Mama Shelter might be considered a post-boutique hotel. "It is not a boutique, not a hotel à la mode," Trigano said, "it is a contemporary hotel where you can bathe in the Paris cityscape." The future, he maintains, lies in small city hotels.

"When I first left the Club I thought of opening small hotels in, say, Morocco. But I think, and this is just intuitive, that tastes have changed among the younger generation.

"I think the 20th century was the century of big enterprises like the Club Med with people going to the ends of the earth and I have the feeling that at the present time you take the TGV train and go from Paris to Brussels or from Amsterdam to Rome for an exhibition or a concert. That's why I am directing my firm toward urban hotels."

Serge Trigano & Sons has three projects afoot for hotels in Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux, cities that have a mix of leisure and business customers. "The principle would be the same, to discover cities via unexpected quarters where things are happening, to build hotels perhaps smaller than this one where the quarter and the city and clientele come together."

Mama Shelter still smells of fresh paint, but its 172 rooms are well booked. Aided by the economic crisis, Trigano's intuition looks set to pay off. The idea of possible imitators worries him not at all.

"People tried to imitate the Club," he pointed out, "and they never could."

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