Hôtel de la Marine

Palace · Place de la Concorde (8th)Paris,France

The king's furniture store on the Place de la Concorde, its eighteenth-century rooms put back down to the fire irons and chamber pots.

The Hôtel de la Marine is a set of eighteenth-century state rooms put back as if the household had just left. The wallpaper, the furniture, a laid table, the chamber pots and the fire irons are all there, and you walk through the rooms rather than past them. It is the most complete set of pre-Revolutionary rooms in Paris still standing where they were built. At the front, a covered balcony runs the whole length of the columns and looks straight down onto the Place de la Concorde. The building was raised to store the king's furniture, and the public was let in once a month to look at it. Ange-Jacques Gabriel finished it in 1774 as one half of a matched pair facing the new royal square. Behind the row of columns sat the crown's tapestries, armour, ceremonial arms and jewels, until thieves emptied the jewel room in September 1792. The navy ministry then moved in and stayed for more than two hundred years, leaving in 2015. The rooms upstairs were the apartments of the officer who ran the store, and the building opened to visitors in 2021.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The courtyard and the arcade cost nothing — You can walk into the glass-roofed courtyard and along the ground-floor arcade without a ticket. The apartments and the galleries are the paid part.
The rooms are small and they fill up — These are domestic-scale rooms, so one full group makes them feel crowded, and the quietest stretch is the first hour of the day.
The pair of palaces was one design — The building next door came from the same architect at the same time, so read the two as one facade cut by a street.
The Al Thani galleries are a separate visit — A private collection of objects from across Asia and the Middle East fills vaulted rooms on the lower floor, ticketed apart from the apartments.
Late afternoon is the hour for the balcony — The front of the building faces south across the square, so the covered balcony stays sunlit long after the courtyard has gone into shade.

Things to do

1
Step out onto the balcony over the square
The balcony runs the whole width of the building, one floor up and just behind the row of columns. Go out onto it and look straight ahead. The obelisk stands in the middle distance and the whole eight-sided square opens below you, so from up here you see its shape as a whole instead of a road crossing.
2
Find the laid table and count the places
In the apartments, look for the dining room where the table is set as if the meal were about to begin: plates, glasses, folded linen, the chairs pushed back. You can stand right beside it, because it is not shut behind glass. Count the places, then find the servants' door hidden in the wooden panelling.
3
Cross the glass-roofed courtyard
The old carriage gate opens into a courtyard that is now roofed in glass. Stand in the middle and look up. Four storeys of windows rise on all sides, with the glass roof overhead, and one side of the courtyard is the back of the wing whose columns face the square. From here you get a better sense of how big the building is than you do from the front.