Stylish Paris Pocket Guide
The Wallpaper City Guide Packs the Best of Paris into your Pocket
Guides to places like Paris get bigger and bigger, but some of the best guides are specialist guides like the Wallpaper Pocket Guides which focus in on the best of a city
The best guides to cities like Paris and London are coming to be the guides that home in on a particular aspect of the city, whether it be food, shopping, art, walking, history or architecture. In the case of the fairly new series of Wallpaper City Guides, the emphasis is on style and design.
The Wallpaper City Guide to Paris still covers the best restaurants and best hotels in France's City of Light, but it makes its selection based on what's chic and what's stylish, as well as what's good. The name of Philippe Starck appears again and again in these pages, and the book includes an Insider's Guide to the City (one of the interesting features of this series) from designer and architect Patrick Jouin, a former protege of Starck.
As well as having worked with Starck, Patrick Jouin is the man who designed the stunning interior of the Hotel Plaza Athenee, where superchef Alain Ducasse works his magic and definitely one of the best hotels in Paris. Jouin also recommends some of his favourite eating places, like Aux Lyonnais, which also features in the Michelin Paris 2007 restaurant guide.
The Paris Wallpaper City Guide highlights the city's landmarks, including the Pompidou Centre and the spectacular Grande Arche de la Defense, but for a stylish guide they seem to have chosen the dullest photos possible of the UNESCO building and Sacre-Coeur. Elsewhere the photos hit you right between the eyes, especially its choice of iconic buildings like the Cite de Refuge, designed by Le Corbusier, and hotels like the Petit Moulin and the decor of room 204.
Wallpaper City Guides are light on practical detail (no opening hours though you do get hotel room rates), and you still need to go to one of those heavyweight guides like the Rough Guide for that. But the Wallpaper City Guide's great appeal is that it opens your eyes to the city by showing you things you didn't know were there, or that you had never looked at in quite the same way before.
At little over 100 pages the Wallpaper City Guide to Paris is light enough to slip in your luggage, and cheap enough to buy without thinking twice about it. But it will make you think twice about Paris, no matter how familiar you think you are with the city. Highly recommended, to add to the list when thinking about which are the best Paris guidebooks to buy for your trip.
The Wallpaper City Guide to Paris is published by Phaidon at £4.95 in the UK and $8.95 in the USA.
Visit the Wallpaper website.
