“The Residency” is the format that explores the pulse of contemporary leisure, one cultural trend at a time. A moment of reflection on how leisure is no longer pure escape, but a deeper territory of aesthetic, social, and personal transformation.
This episode takes us to the Marais, Paris. Or rather, to a specific version of it: shaped by velvet textures, heavy curtains, mirrored bars and subtle fictions. A Paris resembling that of a Woody Allen movie, suspended in its own mythology. Where the line between past and present blurs, and the city becomes a stage for imagined lives. We’re talking about Hotel Experimental Marais, a project by Experimental Group and interior designer Tristan Auer, where every room is designed not only to be lived in, but imagined.
A fictional character dreamed up by Auer — cultured, elegant, slightly elusive — hovers over the space like a host. He is everywhere and nowhere. In the way the light falls on the parquet. In the choice of cocktail. In the stillness of a velvet armchair. Where would he sit? What would he order? How would he spend his time? And who would he wait for?
Here, every gesture becomes narrative. The stay becomes a performance.
You linger. You observe. You move a little slower.
This is the signature of Experimental Group. Since 2007, the collective has been curating not just places, but states of mind. Starting with cocktails and gradually building a European constellation of hotels, bars, restaurants and clubs that invite a new kind of leisure: intimate, immersive, and aesthetically uncompromising.
In Paris, Experimental’s presence is a cartography of experiences.
From the contemporary style of the Grands Boulevards, to the retro sensuality of Grand Pigalle, each property has its own tone, its own rhythm. Yet what connects them is the approach to space: mood is everything, and everything has a mood.
The Marais property is perhaps the most introspective of them all. It seduces you whispering. To stay, here, is to inhabit a fiction made just for you.
