Hotel of the Week: This New Paris Hideaway Celebrates Groundbreaking Women in Art

Orchestrated by designer Daniel Jibert, Maison Barrière Vendôme includes uniquely decorated rooms that pay homage to icons like Agatha Christie, Nina Simone, and Mata Hari while the buzzy restaurant nods to Frida Kahlo

April 18, 2025

Maison Barrière Vendôme. Photo: Patrick Messina

Zellige-style tiles encrust the interior courtyard of Frida, a Mexican restaurant in Paris at the five-month-old Maison Barrière Vendôme, in wall-to-wall emerald. A manicured lawn forms a matching green moat around Frida’s sunroom, where silver baskets of balloon-sized croissants wear raspberry stripes and guests drift in and out all day, as if staying at a worldly friend’s pied-à-terre. The ebullience of the zigzag-patterned ceiling and tutti-frutti velvet chairs feels atypical—almost revolutionary—in a neighborhood inhabited by the likes of the Ritz, Crillon and Paris’s other corseted grande dames. Luxury and personality, Barrière seems to want to say with this 26-key debut of their new boutique Maison brand, are not mutually exclusive.

Over coffee and jus vert during Fashion Week, the splendid general manager, Oliver Fernandez, pointed out another difference between his hotel and the neighbors: Frida floats one floor above the clandestine reception salon. “It is not overlooking the city or the street, which gives you a bit of more homey [feeling] and private area in a district where you have many hotels that are usually really packed.” That means a morning cappuccino and pain au chocolat away from the fray—attention seekers might even find it a challenge to locate the place. Maison Barrière Vendôme’s entrance on Rue du Mont-Thabor is discreet by design.

The Alice Guy Castiglione Suite. Photo: Patrick Messina

Inside, a mirrored archway crisscrossed in bronze foliage frames the lustrous circa-1802 staircase that was meticulously dissembled, restored, and reinstalled tread by curving oak tread. Clémentine de Chabaneix, a Parisian sculptor with an organic, whimsical aesthetic (she also made the archway), wove twiggy bronze branches through the spindles, detailing them with little songbirds, coral magnolia blossoms, and a fat owl roosting on the front post. She’s among the team of 20 artisans who spent eight years restoring and beautifying this address, the former headquarters of Lacoste, according to the vision of Corinne Evens, founder of Goralska jewelry.

Like the restaurant, whose godmother is Frida Kahlo, each of the ten classic rooms and 16 suites comprising the hotel have famous women artists as namesakes: Agatha Christie, Nina Simone, Mata Hari, etc. Each has a strong connection to Paris or France, and the homages go deeper than the cameo-style portraits on the bronze guest room doors’s mirrored plaques. In 506, the Josephine Baker room, for example, a tiger-print chaise, fringed ottoman, and metallic fan motif on the hand-painted Atelier de Ricou wall-“paper” subtly reference the American-born performer’s jungle costumes. Didn’t catch that? Read about it in the Josephine Baker books displayed in the marble-framed living-room wall niche.

The Hedy Lamarr Grand Apartment. Photo: Patrick Messina

“The decoration of each room is different,” Fernandez explained, “according to the woman on the door,” whose style the interior designer Daniel Jibert interpreted through a bespoke headboard that serves as the aesthetic anchor for each room. Marlene Dietrich has bronze palms against a pewter field. Sarah Bernhardt, a pattern of geometric flowers in olive and crimson. The rooms share certain features, like original wood-beam ceilings, lighting and jeweled wardrobe handles by Lalique, terrazzo showers flecked with chips of vermillion and cotton candy-pink, weighty brass hardware and Versailles oak floors—true to the elaborately patterned chateau style, down to the wooden nails.

Beyond the Officine Universelle Buly bath products and wine fridges, the best amenity draws its inspiration from something aesthetically antithetical to Maison Barrière. Being in one of Paris’s busiest districts, right between the Jardin Tuileries and Place Vendôme, means noise day and night. Fernandez unlocked and opened Josephine Baker’s balcony door. The white sheers and chocolate drapes blew into the room, along with the din of traffic and tourism. He closed the door and noted the absolute silence. “They use this kind of glass in airport hotels.”

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