Art Hotels

The address is the Zattere, the long quay facing the Giudecca Canal. Boats slide past the front door all day. The building is a Renaissance palazzo that once housed the offices of a shipping company.

Dorothée Meilichzon designed the interiors. She borrowed colours from the houses of Dorsoduro itself: butter yellow, chalky pink, a deep oxblood red. Terrazzo, striped fabrics and curved timber do the rest, so each room feels drawn rather than decorated.

Behind the palazzo there is a quiet garden. The Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are a short walk away, which makes the hotel an easy base for anyone in Venice for the galleries.

Look out of the front windows and the dome of the Panthéon fills the view. The hotel occupies an eighteenth-century building on the square, in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Its idea is simple and well carried out. Rooms are dedicated to celebrated French women, writers and singers among them, and the decoration of each one takes its cue from that life. Édith Piaf has a room. So does George Sand.

The result reads like a set of small portraits. The Sorbonne, the Luxembourg Gardens and the bookshops of the fifth arrondissement are all within a few minutes on foot.

Two great railway stations frame this street. Gare du Nord is on one side, Gare de l'Est on the other, and the hotel takes its name from both.

This was the first hotel interior by the British artist and designer Luke Edward Hall. He went all in on colour: green walls, striped headboards, patterned carpet, painted details and bathroom tiles in clashing tones. Nothing is neutral, and that is the point.

Rooms are compact, as Paris rooms tend to be. For travellers arriving by Eurostar it may be the most vivid first night in the city that requires no taxi at all.