Ah Paris, and parents.
My mom came to visit me, in my 23 msq studio apartment. I took some nights off and left the studio to her, which meant hunting for cheap, yet not too terrible hotels on Expedia, and escaping for a night to each of them.
I can tell you that I had done extensive research and gotten quite good at filtering for very good Google reviews, in particularly nice neighborhoods, under a certain budget. As a result, I believe that in one way or another, I have found some of the best that not a lot of money can buy.
This hotel just off Rue Saint-Antoine in the Bastille area is so lovely. Like many hotels in Paris, don’t expect much consistencies across the rooms. You might see one picture here, and get an entirely different room. I lucked out on this inconsistency through getting a room, with what I believe to be a workable “balcony.” At the risk of having this “balcony” forever bolted shut for future guests, I would like to say that I perched myself ini this tiny area, and had my instant coffee overlooking the (unfortunate) rats running around on the streets. (Don’t get me wrong, this is a very bourgeois area and Paris is not as full of rats as TikTok says, but this is “Food Street”.) The room itself is about 12 msq (which fits but a double bed), but it is Not Ugly. It rather reminded me of how a nice hotel in Cape Cod would be, with tiny lovely touches like artisanal chocolate bars in the reception area.
Verdict: Not Ugly.
If you like the Upper West Side more than the Lower East Side, you will somehow like the area around Folie-Méricourt in the 11th arrondisement (even though it is more like the east side of the Lower East Side than the Upper West Side). (Because I’m a grumpy New Yorker, I’m leaving Brooklyn entirely out of this frame of comparison.) So the Lower East Side can be drab, and this hotel is kind of drab. Even as loose sencha tea from some very nice tea brand sits out, for guests to help themselves to some Japanese green tea, there are prices bold ink listed for coffee. The lobby vibe is very indie-club/hotel/D-I-Y. Either the lift was not working or there was no lift, but if you dislike stairs, small Paris hotels always contain a 20% chance of the lift not working. I paid for the biggest room, and it was located at the corner of the building, and was somehow so well done with its price-conscious resources. The room was not luxurious, but the level of housekeeping keeps it so that it wasn’t drab either. If you feel any doubt about those extraneous blue and red thing in their own published photos, in reality I didn’t mind them so much. It is a huge extra that around the hotel, there is a coffee roaster and one of the best restaurants you’ll eat at, Le Rigodon.
Verdict: Not Ugly
3. Hôtel Castex
Rosemary’s Baby at the edge of Bastille. In Paris, the view on energy is on a practical, visible level, very different from that of New York. (Different also from Moscow, which I’ve heard, is very, very bright.) In Paris, the hallway in residential buildings is always dark by default before motion jolts it into a brief flicker of light. And it appears that hotel lobbies are also dark “after hours.” At first when I arrived at this hotel and found the lobby all dark, I thought it was an electricity outage, but I’ve learnt to roll with the punches with the little quirks of France and the night–which started out a little creepy–ended up quite warm and jovial with the sharing of a delicious Ethiopian dinner with the “receptionist” on duty. (I put the word within quotation marks because he was the night-time security, custodian, and “receptionist” all at once). Yet one felt somehow intrusive in this forlorn space, as though you were where you were not really supposed to be. It is almost like the sense of looking at a room, after everyone else has moved out of it (like that Thomas Hardy poem). Maybe hotels, after hours, always made one feel like an intruder. Oh, they give you a free bottle of wine and the rooms are clean; the management made some very strange decision about what they modernized and what they left because the room also had a smart TV. Never saw the lovely courtyard garden though, that was advertised on their website.
Verdict: Not Ugly (because not trying too hard).
This hotel is the “winner.” The rooms are quite beautifully done, nice touches like giving you boxed “bottled” water, tea from Dammann Frères, soap from Rituals. Also it is located on a very nice street “really” in the Marais. As you might be able to see from the photo above, the bathroom is also fairly spacious, for a boutique hotel. The bed, the pillow, the duvet were all so comfortable.
Verdict: Not Ugly!
Check it out, this hotel has a hammam!
This hotel also has a lobby that serves as a restaurant, and it seems from the menu, that maybe the restaurant is not so bad. The rooms are also named after beaches (maybe imaginary ones, but maybe real ones, I think, in Spain.) But this is also the only hotel out of the list that asked for a €150 deposit to be pre-authorized despite the room already being paid for. Which tells you that that the party atmosphere of the hamman probably did enough damage over the years, that they would insist on the deposit. But I personally hate hotels that do not handle the balance well between imposing “regulations” and giving you the sense that you are at a place where you can really relax. Additionally, despite a nice Nespresso machine, the room was rather ugly, in the way that cheap boutique hotels can be. Full of synthetic fibers gesturing towards a not-entirely-coherent jumble of factory-produced “retro-chic” aesthetics.
Verdict: Ugly (but you’d enjoy staying here anyway).
A Grumpy New Yorker in Paris 
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