If you’ve done the rounds of Paris museums, from the stately Louvre to the exuberant Palais de Tokyo, you are ready to kick off your heels in a hotel covered in amazing art. On its 100th anniversary, the Gustave-Eiffel-designed Hotel Vernet got an overhaul by Francois Champsaur, the interior designer from Marseilles who’s carved a niche decorating art collectors’ homes.
While he kept the iconic stained glass dome in the main dining room, he created thoughtful vignettes of color and shape in every nook of the hotel, using abstract carpets, copper screens and fixtures, ringed chandeliers by Eric Schmitt, a curved bar in the same Carrara marble used on the floor, not to mention a fresco by Jean-Michel Alberola on the ceiling. The artistry extends even to the rooms, outside of which the room numbers sit like sculptures on spotlit pedestals.
