CNBC Business | 20th  arrondissement

20th  arrondissement

The most talked-about hotel of the year may revitalise the least glamorous quarter of Paris. Sarah Wachter reports

A sign that a neighborhood is on the up-and-up – or at least that estate agents want it to be – is when it gets a nickname, often a mangled imitation of New York City’s SoHo. And so it is with the new name for Paris’s 20th arrondissement, SoPig. That’s short for south of Pigalle, the famed Right Bank quarter known for its peepshows. The fact that the 20th is actually several miles west of Pigalle hasn’t stopped the label sticking. 

France’s bobos (as in bourgeois bohemians) have been slinking into this north-east arrondissement, driven out of the Bastille area to the south by galloping real estate prices. This, in turn, has caused indignation among the artist-squatters who came here in the 1990s seeking free space. Rents throughout the warren of design and photography studios have already been rising sharply. 

Bobos are attracted to the area because it retains much of the old, unreconstructed city character – Edith Piaf, legend has it, was born under a lamppost here – and its unusually late-night culture. The area is still full of bistros, theatres and nightclubs, hearkening back to a time when the 20th was outside the city limits and people came to quaff and avoid city taxes. There are also 24-hour boulangeries and places where you can get a key cut at midnight. Yet the neighborhood still evokes its rural past, when the land was covered in vineyards, and even boasts rows of houses with gardens, fast disappearing everywhere else underneath apartment blocks. The local Parc de Belleville has the city’s second-highest promontory, behind only the Sacre Coeur. 

Nevertheless, the 20th is still hardly talked about outside this pocket of Paris. Most people clutching maps are making a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. Hundreds gather outside the cemetery walls to hold a concert every 3 July, the anniversary of his death. 

All that may change, with the opening of a bobo hotel, Mama Shelter, designed by Philippe Starck and constructed by Roland Castro, better known for his low-cost housing. The hotel, on the site of a former garage, aims to be the epicentre of 20th arrondissement cool with its ingenious formula of low-priced, luxury chic and its place in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city. 

“Lots of locals come to hang out here, and people arrive by bus, metro or chauffer-driven limo,” says Jean-Claude  Elgaire, the manager of Mama Shelter. “There’s a real intermingling of the local people here.” A multimedia library due to open in 2010, next door to the hotel will also draw 1,500 people daily to the area, Elgaire reckons. 

To further integrate the neighbourhood into the city, the tramway which snakes through the southern reaches is planned to link with the 20th by 2012. The Mama Shelter  hoteliers are also expecting a more bustling club scene in the years to come, after buying the Fleche d’Or nightclub across the street. And the local brasserie down the street is now planning to upgrade its restaurant section to lure the global hipsters from the hotel.  

Real estate prices still have scope for upward movement. Prices in the 20th, despite a huge run-up in the past few years, mostly hover around €6,700/m2, a third less than areas closer to the centre and about half the prices of Le Marais, which was as hip as SoPig at the end of the last economic downturn.