hospitalitystyle.com

(May 2008) posted on Wed Jul 09, 2008 EDT

A juxtaposition of reflective light and a moody color scheme creates a uniquely Parisian backdrop for the Hotel LUMEN Paris Louvre.

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By Linda Formichelli

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Don't talk "international style" with Herman Bal. With a site within a few minutes' walk of the Tuileries, the Paris Opéra and the Comédie Française, this entrepreneurial hotelier envisioned a luxury boutique hotel that would be as Parisian as the nearby Louvre without feeling like a museum. His design brief called for a mélange of the building's existing Haussmann and Baroque idioms with a modern French accent.

The problem was in finding a team that spoke the same design language. After one year of collaboration, the original architect was, politely, made redundant. For one thing, the firm designed 42 rooms when the hotel brief called for only 32. But more importantly, the vision never quite meshed with Bal's ideas - so he rebid the project.

Bal hired Claudio Colucci, of Colucci Design Studio (Paris and Tokyo), even though the interior designer had never worked on a hotel. "He saw my book and thought it could be an interesting challenge," Colucci says. "As it was my first hotel project, perhaps he thought I would invest more of myself."

Because the project had been started - and stopped - before, both the schedule and budget were tight. Colucci and French architect Alain Daronian started from scratch in June 2006.

There was one concept firmly in place when they came to the job: a focus on light (only fitting for a hotel called LUMEN in the City of Light). Colucci, who was captivated by the reflections of the streets and the sky of Paris, brought that quality of light into the interiors by lining the lobby walls with a shiny steel plate called Remix. He imitated the soft glow of street lamps by moving the Haussmannian-style ceiling framework away from the walls and backlighting it.

Light, in the form of a cloud-like crystal chandelier, makes the central design statement for the intimate lobby. The fixture's interlocking ovals set a motif that carries through the hotel, from the fanciful back of the lobby sofa to the tactile headboards. "My idea was to create bubbles all over the hotel, but the owner said it was too much," he says. 

A grayscale palette intensifies the street-lamp quality of the lobby lighting. Colucci uses words like "retro" and "melancholy" to describe the color scheme, shades he finds reminiscent of the Parisian skyline.