New Hotel Lafayette: a beautiful small hotel in the 9th, and the case for booking up a category

The 9th does not appear on many first-trip shortlists, which is most of what is good about it. Rue Buffault is a quiet residential street between the Opera Garnier and the bottom of Montmartre, the sort of address where the ground floors are boulangeries and dry cleaners rather than souvenir shops, and New Hotel Lafayette sits in the middle of it behind a 1930s facade that gives nothing away.

Inside it has been comprehensively reworked, and the result is one of the better-looking small hotels in central Paris. Fifty rooms across five categories, a patio, and interiors that have clearly had an actual designer rather than a refurbishment budget.

The look, which is the reason to book

The ground floor is genuinely lovely. Deep teal panelling running the full height of the wall, brass sconces, cane-backed armchairs, a boucle sofa in charcoal, and a mature olive in a terracotta pot by the window. It reads as a Parisian apartment belonging to someone with taste and money rather than as a hotel lobby, which is a difficult trick and one that a great many boutique conversions get wrong by trying too hard.

The rooms carry it through. Full-height panelling painted in a warm ochre, built-in wardrobes flanking the bed so the joinery does the work of furniture, black reading lights on articulated arms, striped curtains, and white linen. It is confident and it photographs beautifully, and the coherence between the public rooms and the bedrooms is better than at hotels charging three times as much.

The rooms, and the square metres

Here is the thing to plan around. The hotel publishes 14 square metres for its superior room, which sleeps three, and 18 for the junior suite. The standard double sits below that.

Paris is genuinely the worst city in Europe for this and it is not the hotel's fault: the housing stock is nineteenth and early twentieth century, floorplates are fixed, and a fifteen square metre double is normal across the city at every price point below the palace hotels. Anyone who has stayed in the Marais or Saint-Germain will recognise the arithmetic.

What that means in practice is that two people and two suitcases in a standard double is tight in a way that is fine for two nights and wearing by the fifth. There is nowhere to put an open case, and the two of you will take turns at the wardrobe.

The fix is simple and cheap, and it is the single most useful thing in this review: book a category up. The superior at 14 square metres or the junior suite at 18 makes the room work for two people over a week, and the supplement is small against the nightly rate. The room is not the problem. The room category is.

The decor is worth the money. The floor area is worth one more click at the booking stage.

The location

Strong, and the aggregate reviews agree: it scores around nine out of ten for position across the booking sites, which is unusually high.

Cadet is a two minute walk and puts you on line 7. Galeries Lafayette and the grands magasins are about fifteen minutes on foot, Montmartre is a walk up rather than a metro ride, and Sacre-Coeur appears at the end of streets as you go north, framed between the Haussmann blocks, in the way that reminds you why people fall for this city.

The street itself is quiet, which is the part that matters at midnight. The 9th around South Pigalle has also become one of the better places to eat and drink in Paris over the last decade, so you are walking to dinner rather than travelling to it. The full arrondissement breakdown is here if you are still deciding.

Breakfast

Served until noon, which is a civilised hour and rarer than it should be. Fresh pastry, a good coffee machine, and a spread that guests consistently single out in reviews. Taken late, after a slow start, it is one of the better things about staying here.

Service

This is where our stay diverged from the consensus, and both halves of that sentence matter.

The aggregate score for staff sits around 8.8 out of 10 across roughly two thousand reviews, which is high, and the recurring words are friendly and helpful. That is the weight of evidence and it deserves to be stated first.

Our experience was not that. A Kindle left in the room took a fortnight to recover, and the delay had nothing to do with the item being lost. It was found. What followed was two weeks of unanswered messages, a reception that could not say who was handling it, and an arrangement that had to be rebuilt from scratch each time somebody new picked up the thread. Nobody was rude and nobody was unwilling. There was simply no system, and in the absence of one a straightforward request went round in circles.

The practical lesson, which applies well beyond this hotel: if you leave something behind, get the item, the room number and a named person into a single written message on the day, and reply on that thread rather than starting a new one. Verbal assurances at a fifty room hotel do not survive a shift change.

On the evidence of two thousand other guests, this is not the normal experience here. It was ours, and it is the reason the score sits where it does.

What the rate buys

Around two hundred euros a night puts this well below the boutique hotels of the Marais and Saint-Germain, in a quieter arrondissement, with interiors that hold their own against most of them. The 9th is the reason the number works: you are ten minutes and thirty per cent away from the same quality of stay in the 3rd.

Add the category upgrade and it is still comfortably good value, and the upgrade is the version of this hotel worth having.

The particulars

• Where: 25 rue Buffault, 75009. Cadet metro two minutes, Montmartre walkable.
• Book: a superior or junior suite, not a standard double, if there are two of you or you are staying more than three nights.
• Do not miss: breakfast late, and the walk north towards Sacre-Coeur in the early evening.
• Worth knowing: get anything left behind confirmed in writing before you leave the building.
• Best for: couples on a short trip, and anyone who would rather spend the saving on dinner than on floor area.