HOTEL DES ARTS MONTMARTRE - PARIS

Our Story

The Hôtel des Arts: A family story since 1966 – we are celebrating 50 years of service. Montmartre is a village, our village.

The hotel has existed since 1901, which means that 5 rue Tholozé has been receiving customers from around the world for more than 115 years. Our family took over the hotel in 1966, when tourism and travel were reserved for only a minority of people in France and throughout the world. Most of the guests stayed for months at a time. At that time the hotel was host to many painters and artists who lived off of the sales of their paintings or sculptures. They could often be seen in the hotel's courtyard finishing their works.

We also had many dancers from the Moulin Rouge. My grandparents, Marcel and Jeanne LAMEYRE were friends with "Doris," the head of the Moulin Rouge r***e and the dancers who felt at home at the Hôtel des Arts. Painters from Japan and Asia stopped at the hotel to paint Montmartre and its streets. This was a Montmartre where there were very few tourists, a place where artists, workers and shopkeepers mixed together to create a working-class neighborhood where you could live the good life on the terrace of a café far from the hubbub of downtown Paris, which at that time seemed very far away. The hotel didn't offer much luxury: one toilet for 10 rooms and a few washbasins in the best rooms and with a kitchenette for some.

The 1970s and 1980s would change the life of the hotel as well as that of the family. My grandfather and father experienced the revolution in tourism and travel that would unfold over these years. We saw travel habits change, while the dancers left the hotel for apartments and the painters gradually disappeared. We saw more and more globetrotters from the 4 corners of the world. Our rooms were booked by the day rather than by the month. The end of the 1980s marked a permanent change in the Paris hotel business.

 ...