We all have our reasons for loving Paris; they can be like our personal snapshots of a timeless city. My own reasons are about revisiting my teenage pretensions: sitting in cafes with a notebook, smoking Gitanes and drinking strong petit cafés - and, yes, I probably had a beret askew on my head - or playing backgammon in the Tuilerie gardens in my 20s with a man I thought was a sophisticated university professor but who turned out to be a thief and left me running over the Notre Dame bridge being chased by a penguin-suited waiter. Happy memories indeed. Je ne regrette rien.
Nostalgia for Paris makes you feel you know it and own it and can blind you to the fact that this is a fast-paced, changing city that gets on without you. I was shocked on a recent visit to find that pretentious teenagers would now apparently rather be seen lounging on a Starbucks sofa than indenting their bums with the criss-cross plastic pattern of upright café chairs - but perhaps it is naive to think a European capital could resist the march of the American cardboard cup. Steering clear of the familiar haunts, I was surprised by how much Paris had changed in the five years since my last visit and by how little I knew of the city in the first place.
A change of bedding
I abandoned my old selection of Left Bank lodgings and stayed in the Bastille, which has grown up from its grungy youth to become a hip, lively quarter. Local young professionals now stay here to go out and to avoid the burgeoning prices in the centre of the city. The Hotel Marceau Bastille is a chic new boutique hotel with colourful fabrics in the rooms and tasteful art on the whitewashed walls of the bar and dining area. The breakfast buffet manages to dress up smelly, oozing French cheeses to look tempting at 8.30 in the morning, but I dived into the large baskets of petits pains au chocolat and croissants after eating huge forkfuls of smoked salmon with creamy scrambled eggs.
Had I been travelling à deux, I would have stumped up the extra to stay at the Hotel Murano, a statement hotel that is almost grotesque in its ultra-modern design but that nonetheless looks like a great place to pretend you are "somebody". The corridors as dark as underground tunnels - an attempt to encourage hushed voices, I imagine - making the bright white rooms a shock to your senses. Bright pictures of film stars hang over the beds and curiously large glass ashtrays adorn the tables of these non-smoking rooms. Downstairs in the restaurant, white plastic tubes hang down from the ceiling like the insides of a space-age organ and a DJ masterfully plays light across them along with his urban beats.
Rues less travelled
Forget the traditional walk along the Seine and instead head down to the 13th arrondissement, which is fast becoming the new place for lefty creatives. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France opened here in 1996, with its controversial “open book”, L-shaped towers (they let in too much light for the proper preservation of books, critics said). The march of the academics soon encouraged the artists, who had been priced out of the ultra-chic Marais, to move in as well. (Go to the Marais now for exquisite high-end design stores, selling handmade wallpaper at €250 [£165] a drop, or bespoke furniture and fabrics. There is even a stylist selling design tours of the district, although star-spotting may be more fun: Audrey Tautou sat out on the street sipping sparkling water when I was there.) There seems to be a gallery opening up almost every day in the 13th; on Rue Louise Weiss there are now 14 of these gleaming white spaces. However, this area will never become another Marais: the buildings lack the historical charm, for a start, and hoardings and cranes bespeak an ongoing modern transformation.
Crossing the newest, 37th footbridge across the Seine from the library you find yourself in Bercy Parc, in the 12th, a landscaped area that was once where the city's wine was stored. Here a little village has sprung up with delicatessens, wine cellars and pavement cafes. It is apparently a very in place to be, and I was delighted to find that it is right next door to the Cinémathèque Française, which has a quirky permanent exhibition of all things cinematic, from magic lanterns and optical boxes to costumes and posters. There are also regularly changing temporary exhibitions, such as - when I visited - a journey through German expressionism.
Table tips
The rise of the 13th is apparent in a restaurant on boulevard Vincent Auriol called Djoon, an arresting mix of neoclassical and industrial design, with ceiling murals alongside metallic exposed piping and bright yellow space-age chairs. The food is French fusion, which means you get goat's cheese with Moroccan aubergines or foie gras with cannelloni. It seems to be pulling in the darkly dressed sophisticates and at night becomes a club with international djs.
But I still had a hunger for something of the old Paris, and a table at Brasserie Bofinger satisfied it. This was one of Paris's oldest and greatest brasseries and a regular haunt of old-school Parisians including writers, academics and politicians, as well as the designers Pierre Cardin and Christian Lacroix. No exposed metal inside, no garish lights or curvaceous furniture - just traditional wood panelling and oil paintings. Established in 1864 by a refugee from Alsace, it continues to serve Alsatian choucroute as a speciality – mounds of sauerkraut accompanying pig in its various guises of sausage, ham and pork. Onion soup crusted over with cheesy croutons is another representative dish. The surroundings make you want to be clever, the food makes you want to sleep.
A change of art
I will go back to the Louvre one day but with so many new museums opening it seemed wasteful to retrace old footsteps. The newly reopened musée des Arts décoratifs, housed in a wing adjacent to the Louvre, is a real treat of a museum taking you through the history of French interior design in exquisitely recreated rooms; furnishings, wallpaper and textiles have often been taken entirely from a single chateau. This the perfect way to work out your rococo from your neoclassical, and it clearly shows how decorative art has continued to reuse ideas from the past. The collection goes right up to the present day: it is odd to see furniture from the 1980s and 90s in a museum context.
Back on the Left Bank, appearing from a distance to be at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, is a great architectural and curatorial feat of a museum. The musèe du quai Branly (so named because Jacques Chirac got into trouble for wanting to name it the museum of primitive art) opened in June this year, the largest new museum in Paris since the opening of the Pompidou in 1977. It brings together a vast collection of indigenous art and artefacts from Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas for public viewing; it is also a centre for study and research. The incredible new building in which it is housed, designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, has taken influences from each of the continents, with one building almost completely obscured by a hanging garden. While the exhibits lack many informative labels in English, every object is catalogued online, so if a particular African mask or Amazonian headdress takes your fancy, you can find out more about it at home.
Way to go …
C'est so Paris - the Paris tourist board website
Air France flies to Paris from London Heathrow, London City, Southampton, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Edinburgh Manchester and Newcastle airports, from £75 return.
Tel: 0870 142 4343
Le Marceau Bastille
13, rue Jules César - 75012 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 43 43 11 65
Murano Urban Resort
13, boulevard du temple - 75003 Paris
Tel: + 33 (0)1 42 71 20 00
Djoon
22, boulevard Vincent Auriol - 75013 PARIS
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 70 83 49
Bofinger
7, Rue de la Bastille - 75004 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 42 72 87 82
Marais Design Tour
Reservations: Nicole Barre at Design à Paris by telephone: +33 (0)1 74 30 16 75; or mobile: +33 (0)6 88 73 44 22
Cinémathèque française
51, rue de Bercy – 75012 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 71 19 33 33
Full price €4; reduced price €3; under 12 years €2
Musée des Arts décoratifs
107, rue de Rivoli - 75001 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 44 55 57 50
Full price €8; reduced price €6
Ticket includes access to Musée de la mode et du textile, Galérie des bijoux, and Musée de la publicité (all located at 107, rue de Rivoli)
Musée du quai Branly
37, quai Branly - 75007 Paris
Tel. +33 (0) 56 61 70 00
Full price: €8.5 euros; reduced price: €6
