Paris Discovered

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Paris Discovered

The FIRST complete relocation guide to moving to Paris. We offer private chauffeured transportation for arrivals, departures and excursions outside of Paris.

Since 2002, Holidays France Rentals has striven to provide the highest quality in short-term luxury apartment and home rentals in Paris, Spain, Italy, and the French countryside. After over a decade in the rental business, the HFR Team has cultivated insight and experience that make us leaders within our industry. We can provide tours of the city that can be customized according to the specific in

terests of our clients. We are here to ensure that your time meets and exceeds all expectations. Our staff is flexible, accommodating and attentive, and can be on your doorstep whenever you need us. Our rates are all inclusive and we accept AMEX, Visa, MC, Discover, PayPal and Wire Transfers.

08/06/2026

Petit Palais, Avenue Charles Girault, 8th arrondissement. Built for the 1900 World's Fair alongside its more famous neighbor across the street.

The permanent collection here spans Greek and Roman antiquities, medieval objects, Dutch masters, and a large holding of 19th-century French painting and sculpture. It's a serious collection and entry is free — one of the better-kept secrets on the Champs-Élysées axis, where everything else costs something.

But the architecture is the reason to come. The interior garden is a small cloister hidden in the center of the building. The gallery you see here runs along the garden's edge — vaulted arches, painted ceilings, marble floors that reflect the light from the tall windows. It was designed by Charles Girault and every detail was meant to impress. It still does.

**Local tip:** The Petit Palais café opens onto the interior garden and is one of the calmer lunch spots in the 8th — shaded in summer, protected in winter, and accessible without a museum ticket. You can eat lunch in a 19th-century courtyard without paying admission. Worth knowing.

07/06/2026

The Paris street florist is not a tourist attraction. It's infrastructure.

Almost every neighborhood in Paris has at least one — a fleuriste on a corner or in front of a metro entrance, open six or seven days a week, flowers in buckets on the sidewalk in all weather. The selection follows the season without announcement: tulips and ranunculus in March, peonies and irises in May, sunflowers in August, dahlias in September.

In November, the entire city briefly turns to chrysanthemums for Toussaint (All Saints' Day), when French families visit graves and bring flowers. The florists know this. They stock accordingly.

**Local tip:** Cut flowers in Paris are cheaper than you expect — especially at the outdoor markets (marché d'Aligre, Marché des Batignolles, Marché Monge) where the flower stalls are typically 30-40% cheaper than street florists for the same stems. A large bunch of peonies in season costs about €5 at a market. Worth building into your Saturday routine.

06/06/2026

Rue Chappe, Montmartre, 18th arrondissement. A Tuesday evening in no particular season.

The Eiffel Tower has been the backdrop to more photographs than almost anything else on earth. From Montmartre it looks like this — smaller than you expect, which somehow makes it better. It's not dominating the skyline. It's sitting in it, at the end of a long horizontal city.

The zinc rooftops in the foreground are what Paris looks like from above: Haussmannian gray, chimney pots, the occasional rooftop terrace someone has turned into a garden. From street level you'd never see any of this.

**Local tip:** The Montmartre cemetery sits just below this viewpoint and is one of the most peaceful cemeteries in Paris — less visited than Père Lachaise, with notable graves including Degas, Truffaut, and Dalida. The entrance is off Rue Rachel. Open daily, free, and quiet in a way the rest of the 18th rarely is.

05/06/2026

Rue du Mont Cenis, Montmartre, 18th arrondissement. Spring, briefly.

Cherry blossom season in Paris lasts roughly two weeks, usually in late March to early April depending on the year. There's no announcement. The trees bloom, the neighborhood changes around them, and then it's over and the leaves are green and the moment is filed under things-you-either-saw-or-you-didn't.

Montmartre has several streets where the blossom is particularly good — Rue du Mont Cenis is one of them, a long street that descends from the top of the hill toward the north. This building's clock is a neighborhood landmark visible from a distance. In spring it's framed by pink.

**Local tip:** The Parc de la Turlure, tucked behind Sacré-Cœur on the north side of the Butte, has several cherry trees and is almost always less crowded than the front esplanade during blossom season. Smaller, quieter, and the view north over the 18th is unusual. Take Rue du Chevalier de la Barre up from the métro and follow the signs for the park.

04/06/2026

Rue du Mont Cenis, Montmartre, 18th arrondissement.

Paris ironwork is one of those things that rewards close attention. The Haussmannian building code specified uniform balcony widths and ironwork patterns by arrondissement — which is why you see consistent rhythms across the 8th, 16th, and 17th. Montmartre was largely outside Haussmann's reach. The buildings here were developed more slowly, by more different hands, with less standardization.

The result is ironwork like this: more sculptural, more varied, the kind that some resident decided to grow fuschias through. The flowers hang in the gaps, the iron forms the frame, the buildings behind are just soft enough that none of it competes.

**Local tip:** The Montmartre vineyard — Clos Montmartre — is a real, working vineyard on the Butte, planted in 1933, producing about 1,500 bottles of wine per year. The harvest festival (Fête des Vendanges) happens each October and is one of the better free outdoor events in Paris. The vineyard is on Rue des Saules, visible through the fence year-round.

03/06/2026

France does produce seasonally in a way most countries don't anymore. The strawberries that arrive in May are not the same object as the strawberries in your grocery store in February. They are a different variety, grown nearby, picked close to ripe, and they cost more because they should.

The Gariguette is the one you want if you've never paid attention. Long, dark red, faintly acidic. The Mara des Bois is smaller, rounder, tastes like a wild strawberry. Neither one ships well, which is exactly why they're not on shelves in London or New York.

The markets in Paris that carry them right now: Richard Lenoir (Thursday and Sunday mornings, 11e), Marché d'Aligre (every morning except Monday, 12e), Boulevard de Grenelle under the elevated metro (Wednesday and Sunday, 15e). Buy more than you think you need. Eat them that day. They don't wait.

After June 1st you will see strawberries for sale in Paris. They will be from Spain. They will be fine. They will not be this.

02/06/2026

There's a version of a Paris brasserie that exists primarily to be photographed. Flowers at the entrance, a terrace with good lighting, a menu that doesn't embarrass but doesn't surprise. You know the one. You've seen 200 photos of it without knowing it's 200 different places.

La Favorite was doing this before most of them. The cherry blossom branches, the pink neon, the corner position on Rue de Rivoli where the building turns and the whole thing becomes a set. They understood early that the exterior of a restaurant is content before the food gets involved. Fine.

What's different now is that they seem to have gotten tired of only being beautiful. The kitchen is more serious than it used to be. The service has a point of view. You go for the flowers and then you actually eat something and think: oh, they actually care about this.

That pivot is hard to pull off. Most places that built on Instagram aesthetics stayed there, because the customers who found them through photos keep coming for photos. La Favorite appears to be trying to be both things at once.

Local tip: The Marais has no shortage of beautiful terraces, but if you want to avoid the full tourist circuit, Rue Saint-Paul (one block east of La Favorite, parallel to Rue de Rivoli) runs through a quieter stretch of the 4th with independent galleries, a few good wine bars, and almost no one from a tour group. Worth a walk before or after dinner.

01/06/2026

Île Saint-Louis is one of the two natural islands in the Seine. The other one has Notre-Dame. This one has about 1,600 people who actually live here and one street, Rue Saint-Louis en l'Île, that runs the length of the island with cafes and cheese shops and a Berthillon ice cream branch that people queue for in summer.

It is quietly one of the most desirable addresses in Paris. No metro stop. No department store. No reason to come if you don't live here or know someone who does. The people who live here tend to have lived here for a long time.

What strikes you when you walk through a lobby like this one is that the building doesn't try to impress you. The cobblestone courtyard, the glass-barred doors, the stone staircase behind you — all of it was built to be normal. This was just an apartment building. The neighborhood is the reason it became something else.

Paris is full of this. Buildings that are extraordinary in the way that things get extraordinary when they survive four hundred years intact and enough people leave them alone. You do not need a museum ticket to stand inside this story. You need to know which door to walk through.

Local tip: The quais on the south side of Île Saint-Louis (Quai de Béthune and Quai d'Anjou) are some of the quietest riverside walking in central Paris. No tour boats dock here. Locals sit on the stone banks. It's about a five-minute walk from Notre-Dame and about as far from its crowds as you can get without leaving the 4th.

31/05/2026

Le Marais, Paris. The living room of a furnished apartment in an hôtel particulier.

The hôtel particulier — the private mansion — is the architectural signature of the Marais. In the 17th century, when the neighborhood was the center of Parisian aristocratic life, these large stone mansions were built between courtyard and garden, set back from the street, organized around a grand staircase. Many were nationalized during the Revolution, later converted to ministries, museums, or divided into apartments.

Some remain as furnished rentals, available for short or long stays through specialist agencies. They offer ceiling heights, volumes, and architectural detail that no contemporary apartment can replicate — beams, terracotta floors, carved fireplaces, stone walls.

This apartment has tulips on the table, which is the right thing to have in a room like this.

**Local tip:** If you're relocating to Paris and considering furnished housing, hôtels particuliers in the Marais represent one of the best arguments for the rental market over buying — the rental stock includes properties that could never be built today, at prices that reflect the Paris market rather than a museum admission fee. Several specialized relocation services can help identify these properties before they reach the general market.

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