The Park Hyatt Paris Vendome by Jamie Dunford Wood

The Park Hyatt Paris Vendome, to give this hotel its full name, is the latest Paris designer offering, opened in August 2002, designed by Ed Tuttle of Amanresorts fame. Just off the Place Vendome, the interiors of a number of classic Paris townhouses have been ripped out and refashioned into something that looks like a cross between an Armani emporium and the 'break-out' floor of an avant-garde multinational corporation. Unlike most hotels, the reception desks (discreet and stand-alone, like new wave banks) are set at the back of the building - to lead you there, a seemingly endless supply of loitering but smiling staff dressed in black, mostly young and mostly pretty, some with wires coming out of their ears. On the way you pass a well designed breakfast/snack/meeting/loitering/reading area, the forum of the hotel, part of it in natural light under a glassed-in atrium, part in artificial light, a balanced tension between light and dark that is the most successful element of this hotel. However, for a breakfast bar Ed Tuttle has designed a table of hideous cystal sculptures backed by a huge concave mirror. Presumably the bacon and eggs in the morning acquire an added potency from all this reflected crystalology - but when breakfast has been cleared away you are left with the modern echo of a medieval monstrance.

At the entrance there is an imposing bronze sculpture of two figures reaching up and welcoming you in, and after a while you begin to see these figures, singly and together, repeated everywhere; nowhere more so than in the bedrooms, where it provides a tactile if angular door handle, window handle and wall mounted light brackets. At night these light up to provide pools of light with religious overtones. Personally I would be tempted to unscrew some of these handles and take them home as souvenirs, just as the tap tops at the Triest in Vienna make ideal cufflinks. But staff at the Hyatt express amazement that anyone would consider such a thing.

Elsewhere, large sliding doors in expensive dark wood slide open the bathroom area according to your inclination - a design feature that feels just right in a tropical Amanresort, but looks strange in a big metropolis. The walls are painted in a taupe colour - a chocolatey/grey/mauvy colour, with paneled segments and window and door frames in gold. Again, stunning in the bright sunlight of a south east asian jungle. Rather gloomy in the dull light of a Parisian winter, especially in those darker rooms which face the inner courtyard.

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