Place des Vosges

Landmark · Le Marais (4th)Paris,France

The first square in Paris built to a single design, thirty-six matching brick-and-stone houses on arcades around a garden, ordered by Henri IV in 1605.

Place des Vosges is a perfect square: thirty-six matching houses of brick and stone standing on arcades around a garden of gravel walks, clipped limes and open lawn. Nine houses fill each side, every one raised on a covered walk of arches, with two floors above and a steep slate roof. Step in at a corner and the street noise drops. The lawns are open to sit on, art galleries and restaurant tables fill much of the arcade, and musicians play under its arches. It was the first square in Paris built to a single design. Henri IV ordered it in 1605 on an old horse market, as silk workshops at first, so that France would stop buying Italy's silk, and he was assassinated in 1610 without seeing it finished. A marble Louis XIII rides at the centre, replacing a bronze the Revolution melted down. Beyond the shopfronts only two doorways are open to visitors: number 6, where Victor Hugo lived, and a corner passage running through an old mansion garden to the next street.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in the last hour of daylight — the sun drops behind the west side, so the east side turns orange while the west goes flat and grey.
A wet day is not a lost day here — the ground floor was built as a covered shopping walk, so when rain starts the garden empties and everyone moves under the arches.
Two houses rise above the rest — They face each other north and south, each with a street running beneath, and are named for a king and a queen who never lived there.
Nothing above the arcade is open to you — the houses are private flats and offices, so the shopfronts and the garden are as far in as any visitor gets.
The fenced garden holds a playground, a sandpit and public toilets — that is unusual in a garden this formal, and it gives children somewhere to go while the adults look at the houses.

Things to do

1
Follow the pillars round all four sides
Start under the taller house on the south side and keep the pillars on your left. The same arch repeats past every doorway until you are back where you began. Look up and compare the ceilings as you go, because each house was raised by a different owner working to one imposed design.
2
Lie on the lawn and read the roofline
Take a patch of grass in the afternoon and lie flat with your head towards the nearest row of houses. From down there the whole ridge looks like one unbroken line of blue slate, with roof windows and chimney stacks repeating along it. From the ground you cannot tell where one house ends and the next begins.
3
See the arcade before the tables come out
Come at first light, while the garden gate is still locked and the restaurants have not set out their tables. The arcade is then empty end to end, and you can see the ground floor as it was built, arch after arch with nothing standing in front of it. Later, chairs and awnings hide most of it.