Hôtel La Cour Carrée Bordeaux Centre

Scandinavian Furniture Against Two-Hundred-Year-Old Stone

Rue de Lurbe is one of those short Bordeaux streets that most visitors cross without registering, a minute from the Place des Grands Hommes and out of its traffic. The building is around two hundred years old and the renovation left the evidence in place: beams overhead, blocks of pale stone showing through the plaster, the proportions of a bourgeois house. Against that, the furniture is deliberately modern, light wood and clean lines in a Scandinavian register. The combination could easily have gone wrong. It does not, because the old surfaces were left to speak and the new pieces keep quiet.

Why It Works

We kept this one for its size and its address in the same breath. Sixteen rooms is small enough that the patio is never crowded and the staff know who is staying. The position, a hundred metres from three of the busiest squares in central Bordeaux, is the kind you normally pay a chain premium for. And the design has a point of view: rather than covering the historic fabric, it sets contemporary furniture against it. Children are welcome here, which is not always the case in boutique houses of this scale.

Why This Location

This is the heart of the eighteenth-century city. The Place des Grands Hommes and its market rotunda, the Allées de Tourny and the Place Gambetta are each about a hundred metres from the door, which puts the restaurants of the Triangle d’Or, the Grand Théâtre and the shopping of the rue Sainte-Catherine within a few minutes on foot. Walk east and the Place de la Bourse, the miroir d’eau and the quays of the Garonne open up. Walk north and the Chartrons wine quarter begins. Parking is available, but the car will stay where it is.

Fast Facts

• Price: Upper mid-range

• Vibe: Contemporary design in an old shell, small, central, calm

• Rooms: Sixteen rooms, most with exposed beams and stone walls, some with a sitting area, air conditioned

• Best For: Couples, design travellers, families who want a boutique address rather than a chain

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: The terraced patio, laid out as a room to sit in rather than a passage, which is what turns a sixteen-room hotel into a house

• Dining: Buffet breakfast prepared each morning; the restaurants of the Place des Grands Hommes and the Triangle d’Or are a two-minute walk

• Amenities: Terraced patio, air conditioning, parking, family rooms

• Attractions: Place des Grands Hommes, Allées de Tourny and Place Gambetta all about a hundred metres away, the Grand Théâtre, the Place de la Bourse and the miroir d’eau, the Chartrons

The Patio at the Centre of the Plan

The patio is the reason the hotel is called what it is, and it does the work that a lobby would do elsewhere. It is terraced, planted and enclosed by the building on its sides, so it holds the warmth in the evening and stays out of the wind. Breakfast moves there when the weather allows. In the middle of a dense quarter, having somewhere outdoors that belongs to the house is worth more than an extra lounge, and guests use it accordingly, in the morning with coffee and again before going out to dinner.

Sixteen Rooms of Beam and Stone

Most of the rooms carry the visible structure of the building, beams across the ceiling and stone on at least one wall, with contemporary furniture set against it. Sizes vary as they do in any converted house, and some rooms add a sitting area, which is worth asking for on a stay of more than two nights. Bathrooms are private, with a bath or a shower depending on the room, and air conditioning runs throughout, which matters in a Bordeaux July. Check-in opens at three in the afternoon and runs to nine at night; check-out is flexible up to eleven.