After several days tracing our way through Europe and rounding out a slow, design-led tour of the Mediterranean, Paris became our final, decidedly more polished stop.

Hôtel Balzac set the tone immediately: deep wood-panelled walls, sharply tailored doormen, and room keys weighted with black tassels that made our own feel disappointingly pedestrian. The foyer balanced 1930s modernist lines with a calm, disciplined restraint. Upstairs, our room continued the quiet luxury—crisp white linens, soft taupe, sculptural black accents, and enough subtle detailing to keep any design tragic happily occupied. Breakfast arrived with the right degree of ceremony. The Japanese spa remained admired conceptually rather than visited.

Re-acclimatised, we drifted back into the city’s cultural current. At Hauser & Wirth, Rita Ackermann’s early works glowed against grand Parisian bones. Bold, hazy and wonderfully confident. We wandered to the Musée d’Art Moderne, then the Grand Palais, where the Euphoria Art & Air exhibition transformed the space into a buoyant dreamspace of inflatables and impossible light. Paris excels at arranging beauty in sequence, so naturally, lunch followed. We closed our loop at Aurelien Serre’s Saint-Germain studio—an elegant study in vintage restraint and contemporary clarity.

A gentle detour south led us to Le Doyenne, where time softened. Set within a former stable, the guesthouse expressed craftsmanship through lime-washed walls, timber beams and stone floors. At dinner, locally fired ceramics and heirloom vegetables grown just metres away grounded each dish firmly in place and in season. A fitting finale to a journey defined, above all, by the pursuit of beautiful spaces.

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