Review of Hotel Color Design, by Vitali Vitaliev

Four fluorescent retort-shaped lamps: blue, green, red and purple - shine from a window of a house in the otherwise rather drab and deserted Rue De Citeaux in the Bastille area of Paris. An accidental pedestrian feels drawn to them like a nocturnal moth to a street lantern. Architecturally, this brightly lit up lobby window of Hotel Color Design is not just a statement - it is a scream!

Conceived by Jean-Marc Calabert, a famous Paris hotelier, and designed by Carole Picard, Hotel Color Design has won itself the reputation of one of Paris's sexiest and trendiest boltholes - largely due to its eponymous "colour design": contrasting colours highlighted on white background, pure and straight geometric lines. It is simultaneously soothing and unnerving, calming and inspiring, innovative and near-conservative - almost Victorian - in its beautiful impracticality.

My reassuringly purple suite (one of the eight suites of the 46-room hotel - two on each floor) had an iPod docking station, a flat-screen TV, with the most user-friendly remote-control I had ever seen: it had just 4 buttons. Bright modernistic reading lamps above the bed were in the shape of two troubled rattle snakes preparing to attack the cuddly lamb-like pillows and the bean bags serving as chairs.

Multiple shades of purple in the suite were relaxing, at times pleasantly "girly". The room would have been great for quiet meditation had it not been for the bathroom, with its totally transparent door (I spent a lot of time trying - in vain - to cover it with a towel to have some privacy). On the brighter-purple, positive, side, however, water in the shower kept changing hues: from blue to green and then to yellow - and that was mesmerising! And the surround stereo sound all over the bathroom was bound to appeal to those larger-than-life characters who enjoy singing in the shower in front of a totally see-through door facing a mirror.

At night, the deep and beautifully lit-up well of the hotel's Dostoyevskian (old St. Petersburg-style) courtyard accumulated all sorts of noises - both internal (from inside the hotel) and external (from the street), like an antediluvian radio receiver with a green feline eye. Yet strangely enough, they didn't stop me from having a deep sleep and seeing childish Technicolor dreams.

To me, one of the greatest attractions of Color Design was its location - in the middle of the bohemian, trendy and vivacious 12th arrondissement near Place de la Bastille, in close proximity to three Metro stations and a lively street market round the corner, in Rue Crozatier - the area resplendent with boutiques, art galleries and reasonably priced bistros, including the unbeatable L'Encrier (55 Rue Traversier).

All modern hotels are now facing a dilemma - a choice between trendy and practical. Color Design - with its minimalist décor, at times "minimalists" conveniences, yet with huge ambience and artistic charge - successfully manages to combine both.