Hotels… AirBNBs… Camping… Sleeping in your car…
And then there is this apartment in Paris. We signed up for HomeExchange and had people come to stay at our house and we used those points to stay here. The Salon Apartment in Paris.
One might suppose every American would have a vision in their head about the perfect apartment in Paris. A tree-lined street outside with a cafe below, with conversations wafting up through the grand, open windows. Sipping your espresso and poaching a couple of eggs and spreading fine butter on this morning’s baguette.
But one might never imagine an apartment like this.
Huge, oak doors with polished brass next to the cafe. Grand marble entrance of time-smoothed mosaic floor. An ultra-modern elevator that might hold one person. Curved, marble stairway to the first floor. Another grand oak door with polished brass. Rattle the keys in the locks and a sleek, ultra modern entrance, kitchen to your left, black walls and ancient parquet oak floors and paintings lit with brass lamps and then you walk through the double doors to Le Grande Salon.
Damn.
Huge windows, genuine art, not the leftover, thrift store art you’ll find at La Quinta. But real art, modern, unique, sourced and placed with as much thought as the artist took to create each piece, alongside two huge portraits from a master several hundred years ago… “Our ancestors.”
The main room is the kind of place you’d enter one Saturday night and find brilliant minds engaged in life-changing conversations. Artists, musicians, writers, scientists. The people one might meet at Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris decades ago, minus the overpowering scent of cigarettes and spilled champagne.
This place of the perfect mixture of antique grandness and modern modernity and exquisite taste. Nothing that doesn’t fit.
And it’s home for the week.
THIS is how you experience Paris.
And the real difference is that you could never find a hotel like this because that’s a business transaction. This is a personal invitation. You’re a guest here with the responsibilities and privileges of being a true guest.
The owners even left two sets of keys with an Eiffel Tower keyring, each with our first name initials.
Seriously.
We’ve both been to Paris multiple times, enough times that we didn’t need to fight the crowds at the Louvre. But we’ve never seen Paris like this.
I’ll take some time to look out the window, sip my hot espresso, take a bite from the baguette, and maybe consider this finished.
