The east is rising again and there’s revolution in the air. Paris is reinventing itself, and visitors are now being encouraged out to a more working class, post-industrial landscape. With the tourist experience becoming more and more sanitised, the creators of the Mama Shelter hotel in the east of Paris are gambling on people’s desire for more authenticity.

The hotel was designed by Philippe Starck, and is the brainchild of the Trigano family (founders of Club Med) with the assistance, rather bizarrely, of a philosopher, Cyril Aouizerate. The Triganos also own the Fleche d’Or café, situated in a converted train station on the opposite side of the street, and are rapidly cornering the market in rough urban chic. The Fleche d’Or has long been the trailblazer for this part of Paris, and it hosts free concerts by up and coming international artists most nights of the week.

Mama Shelter Hotel

The Mama Shelter has risen from the ruins of a brutalist multi-story garage building and it dominates the disused Petite Ceinture railway line below. This line hasn’t been in operation since the 1930s, but the tracks remain in place and it provides a curious perspective from the hotel’s bar and restaurant. This vista is an essential part of the hotel’s marketing which would like us to see the establishment as a luxurious harbour in the heart of a new bohemia. Being a large structure (172 rooms), this is no boutique hotel, but with its sleek, discrete forms, this is perhaps the beginning of a new genre; loft hotels.

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