The Hotel des Grands Hommes is perfect in all sorts of ways. If strolling on a Sunday morning in the atmospheric Luxembourg Gardens is your idea of integrating with the natives, then HGH is ideally located. If you seek inspiration from the Great Men entombed in the Panthéon opposite, then choose a room at the front of the hotel for a view of its imposing, floodlit dome. And if you like your décor neo-classical in the Directoire style, the elegant lobby and accommodations of HGH will fit your bill precisely. (We’re talking baldaquin beds, fabric on the walls, frescoes and patterns galore.)
Despite the hoards of Sorbonne students who chill out in the square, the hotel has little if any noise disturbance. Indeed a particular joy is to take the air on the balcony of one of the top floor rooms and marvel at the distant Sacré Coeur atop the Butte de Montmartre, the city’s highest hill. The hotel is small enough for the exceptionally obliging staff to establish a personal rapport with guests. There is a compact, vaulted cellar for breakfast (which, unlike perhaps the rooms, is very reasonably priced). The only gripe concerns the speed of the lift – more Paula Radcliffe perhaps than Usain Bolt.
If the hotel is fully booked, use its website to access its shared reservations system for availability at other, associated left-bank hotels.