best hotels of the world( Hôtel Le Bellechasse Paris)

Design Hotel. Three years after garnering raves as the creator of the Marais’s fanciful Hôtel du Petit Moulin, couturier Christian Lacroix is back with a discreet (at least from the outside) 34-room hideaway, seconds on foot, our stopwatch confirms, from the Musée d’Orsay. (Indeed, you can practically hear management crow, “Location, location, location.”) And in a city where hotels tend to lean more toward the classic than the cutting-edge, the property makes all the more of a grand debut. Lacroix heaps the same famously baroque, magpie sensibility on Le Bellechasse as he does on his robes du soir, and like those hysterical-patchwork bonbons, you either love the hotel or it gives you a headache. (We love it.) In colors picked from a psychedelic garden, the eye-bending photo-transfer collages are a trip and a half—in one guest room, top-hatted, frock-coated dandies with butterfly wings wrap around both walls and ceiling. We’re less crazy about the fiberglass bathtubs, and the lobby, a sexless space, definitely needs shooshing up. But there’s much to admire in the staff’s esprit de can-do.