A Paris Hotel With Rooftop Views and a Rock-Climbing Wall

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Paris’s 17th Arrondissement, near the city’s northwestern limits, is mostly residential, so it’s not typically front of mind for visitors to the French capital. But the opening of La Fondation, a 58-room hotel with interiors by the New York-based design firm Roman and Williams, might shift that mind-set. It’s part of a new 10-story complex that also includes an office space with rooftop gardens, a gym — which features a rock-climbing wall, 80-foot-long pool and multiple fitness rooms — and a spa with saunas, a hammam and treatment rooms. Hotel guests get access to all of this, along with two French restaurants — a classic bistro and a fine-dining option, both helmed by the local chef Thomas Rossi — and a rooftop bar that offers sweeping views spanning from the Sacre Coeur to the Eiffel Tower. For the hotel décor, Roman and Williams referenced the city’s late Modernist period: rooms feature color-blocked walls bordered by oak frames — a nod to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dress. In the common areas, large-scale commissions such as a wooden wall sculpture by the Croatian artisan Vedran Jakšić or the painted ceramic tiles by French artist Pierre Yves Canard, merge with the architecture. “There’s a constant interplay between refinement and rawness, fashion and function, Paris then and now,” says Robin Standefer, a co-founder of Roman and Williams. La Fondation opens April 28; from $440 a night, en.lafondationhotel.com.

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The Prague-based design historian and photographer Adam Štěch had an early fascination with marine biology. “My role model was [the French oceanographer] Jacques Cousteau,” he says. “I wanted to be an explorer.” Štěch, who later developed a keen interest in architecture, has visited nearly 50 countries, documenting notable 20th-century buildings and forgotten ones too. As a result, he often fields inquiries from friends bound for Honolulu or Paris or Mexico City. “What should I see?” goes the familiar refrain. “Tell me some hidden Modernist gems.” Now — thanks to the online magazine and first-time book publisher Sight Unseen, with support from the Swiss company USM Modular Furniture — these answers arrive in pocket-size book form. “Modernist Travel Guide” is a tour of 30 international cities, each with a dozen or so highlights. Some, like the psychedelic Pannenhuis Metro Station in Brussels or Arne Jacobsen’s canopied gas station outside Copenhagen, are open to the public. Others, like the Berlin example of Le Corbusier’s colorful Unité d’Habitation buildings, can only be admired from the street. The book’s breadth — a Madrid optics institute, a Los Angeles deli, a little-known London storefront designed by the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius — prompts an offbeat scavenger hunt, wherever you might wind up. “Modernist Travel Guide” will be available May 8; $38, shop.sightunseen.com.

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The Japanese Swiss artist Teruko Yokoi lived and worked in New York’s Hotel Chelsea for three productive years until she moved out in 1961. She never returned, says her daughter, Kayo, who has managed her estate since her death in 2020. But next month, the abstract painter and collage artist will have a homecoming of sorts with the opening of a Japanese restaurant named after her and an exhibition at the nearby Hollis Taggart gallery. The restaurant, in the hotel’s cellar, will serve simple Japanese dishes (plated on the chef Tadashi Ono’s own ceramics) across a 12-seat sushi bar and dining room, with a cocktail area specializing in Japanese whiskies. Guests can access it from inside the lobby or, through an exterior staircase tucked between the hotel’s main entrance and a longstanding guitar shop that leads into a small, subterranean garden passageway. Nine of Yokoi’s paintings from throughout her career will be on display and, a few blocks over, 25 others will comprise a gallery survey co-curated by her grandson, Tai, who also oversees her estate. Titled “Noh Theater,” it draws parallels between that traditional form of Japanese performance and the artist’s work. Both often employ tea paper (the former for its programs) and are characterized by “slow, deliberate and symbolic movements,” as Tai writes in an accompanying essay. Kayo says her mother had a history of showing her work beyond galleries: After relocating her family to Switzerland following the dissolution of her marriage to the painter Sam Francis, Yokoi exhibited her work in public spaces like restaurants and hospitals. “She wanted to bring beauty and create a refuge from this tumultuous world,” Kayo says. “I think she would be very happy about this.” The restaurant Teruko will open in mid-May; “Noh Theater” is on view from May 1 through Jun. 14, hollistaggart.com.