Jean-Pierre Marois: "I was an independent film producer, I am an independent hotelier, an independent perfumer"

Choosing the right partners

Jean-Pierre Marois: "For Les Bains Paris, I trusted RDAI because they are players whose job is to transpose Parisian chic around the world. The idea was to capture this history and to be timeless. Tristan Auer is now a star in interior design and decoration and Les Bains was almost his first hotel.

The choice of who I decided to work with was key. It's the same as in the cinema. It's a question of choosing a nose to develop the perfume range, a chef to develop the menu and a decorator to tell a story that is quite specific as best as possible. In the decoration, I wanted to give the impression of all the layers of an independent family hotel, as if it had always been a hotel.

There are Hausmannian mouldings in the rooms, the bathrooms give the impression of being in the Orient Express in 1900, there are also punctuations that take you back to the 1970s in Yves Saint Laurent's flat. That's what makes it timeless in the end."

How did you come to the decision to transform your building, which was under a danger order, into a hotel? Did your experience with the Gabriel Hotel give you the confidence to launch such an undertaking?

JP M: "There are several parameters that made me take the plunge. In 2009 the operator, who owned the business, had bought it from the founders of the nightclub Les Bains Douches, who had contracted with my father in 1978. He started to knock down partitions without taking advice from architects, without insurance, without a company and without consulting us as owners of the building. He removed load-bearing walls and the building almost collapsed. The establishment was closed by the Prefecture of Police and a partial...