Our Paris Apartment: Sleeping with the Eiffel Tower

Behind the massive royal-blue doors of #23 Rue de Seine, on the Left Bank, half a block from the Quai where the Pont des Art intersects the Louvre, hides a courtyard with an art restoration shop. Within this courtyard is a locked double-door into a 6-story building of apartments. Marie Noel (Merry Christmas) meets us with the ever-lilting two-tone doorbell-like intonation: ”Bon jour!”

Marie Noel is our greeter who works for France Homestyle, the Seattle-based property management company through which I booked this apartment. There is an elevator that goes to the fifth floor and is rated for three people, but they’d have to be three stick figures. Like most Paris elevators, it can barely fit one within its accordion doors. Instead of people, we pile in our luggage, push the 5th floor button and walk up the five flights of marble steps adorned with Oriental red carpet runners that wind in a dizzying pattern past oval windows, past the elevator and up to the sixth floor.

Our apartment welcomes us with rich honey-colored wide-planked flooring, creaky with age and character, a wall-hanging coat tree with mirror, a small hallway to the right with a half bath sweetly scented by delicate lavender soap. At the end of the hall is a compact U-shaped kitchen. “It is small but has everything,” says Marie Noel, opening cabinets to show the colorful China, wine glasses and basic provisions. The window above the sink frames the gilded dome of the Institut de France, and I gasp at the closeness of its magnificence. “Qui,” says Marie-Noel with a nod, as if seeing a monumental dome out one’s kitchen window were a normal occurrence.

Back in the entry and straight ahead is the public space. A narrow wood stairway spirals down to the guest en suite and up to the master suite, but first, the room opens into the dining area, with French doors on to a small balcony overlooking the inner courtyard. In the center of the room is an imposingly elegant square wood table with 6 straight-backed upholstered seats. Against the wall a marble topped buffet sideboard of carved oak, with statues from the Far East in ivory and porcelain. Beyond there is the living area with sofas draped in white muslin and dappled with red-striped silk pillows, side tables stacked with picture books and billowy-shaded lamps, a blood-red wood coffee table with carved legs, perhaps from Indonesia, a large leafy plant and another French-door balcony. Mirrors, paintings and art nouveau sconces adorn the walls. There is a stereo system and telephone, which Marie Noel explains how to use. There is a bookcase full of interesting reads for which we will have no time. It is elegant and chic and all ours for the next five days!

Marie Noel next guides us down the creaky spiral which enters into a unexpectedly spacious room. To one side is an inviting queen-sized bed with draped canopy, a romantic nook. To another is a large desk backed by a wall of built-in cabinets, including a TV which she apologizes does not work but can be fixed. We assure her we do not care. There is a storage room with one of those marvelously absurd European washers, which take forever to cycle, and unvented dryers that go to a thousand degrees to fry but not dry one’s clothes. And there is a bathroom, more spacious than most Paris hotel rooms, tiled in small black and white octagons, featuring a giant claw-footed tub, and a sturdy deco-era lav, plus a toilet and bidet. We ooh and ahh, grateful that this flat more than compensates for the disappointment of the one in London.

Finally, we tromp up the spiral, past the main floor to the piece d’ resistance: the roof-top 3-sided glass room I’d seen in the website photos. The Eiffel Tower is straight ahead to the north, Sacre Couer gleams white on the eastern hillside, the towers of Notre Dame rise to the south, as do the spires of St. Germaine and St. Supice to the west. For the next 5 nights, on the king-size futon that fills this room, I will fall asleep to the gaudy light show on the Tour Eiffel and wake to the view of it over the Mansard rooftops of Paris.

This glass perch is so above-it-all that even sitting on the toilet one has a clear view of the Eiffel Tower. Who’d have thunk it?

But that’s not all. The glass room opens to a terrace and it is here, on folding cafe chairs around a large wrought-iron and glass table, that the four of us will share meals and laughs and stories and, most of all, create memories to cherish for the rest of our lives.

“It is OK then? You will be happy here?” asks Marie-Noel. Yes, we will be very happy here.

London in Summation

OK, so our London adventure was not seamless. One could say it was disastrous, but I would not. Humor forbids it. But the trip did improve in every respect, and that’s what I remembered after it was over, when I began this blog sequence.

Yet London was full of laughs and delights — the live-like plague-rat puppet purchased from The Globe gift store, which Jan used to torment her younger brother into fits of laughter; The absurd justification by the owner of our expensive Kensington flat as to why he did not provide soap, shampoo, tea or sugar; The British Museum’s Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles (pillaged from Greece and still controversial); Discovering architect John Soan’s surprising house/museum; The view from the Tate Modern’s restaurant, where we walked in without a reservation, just before it opened at 6pm, and were seated at the window; Westminster Abbey after it was closed to the public; and, most especially, the company of friends:

Di and Andre are an artistic English couple living in Wales who, in 1992, took a shower at our mountain home west of Denver (since the distant relative they were visiting had no running water) and drove the three hours from their hilltop farm to spend the evening with us in London. “It was the least we could do,” they said.

Jonathan, a man I met via the internet only a few months before while attempting to rent a flat in Paris — of which he has a gorgeous one in the Marais but it was not available for our dates — drove from the northeast side of London to meet us for a drink at a Kensington pub on our last evening.

Ben, a friend-of-a-friend who came through Santa Fe three years ago and stayed at our home, guided us with brilliant narrative through Soho, Trafalgar Square, St. James and Green Parks on a Friday night, after pints and great Indian food. Then, he spent Sunday afternoon with us wandering Southwalk amid street performers, big bronze statues and riding “The Eye,” a bird’s eye view of the sprawl of London.

To have better appreciated the history and architecture, we would have needed more time, more guidance and a more-comfortable bed. Four days, including two in the daze of jet lag, is not enough. For people traveling to London (or any major city you do not know) for just a few days, I recommend a tour — it’s more cost effective and less stressful than my do-it-yourself approach.