Maison Baccarat

Of the various splendid artefacts to be found in the former Hôtel Bischoffsheim on the south side of Place des États-Unis in Paris, perhaps the one most pertinent to its current purpose—housing the legacy of the Baccarat crystal empire—is to be found in a small, somewhat inconspicuous room abutting the main bar. Just beyond the Midi-Minuit lounge is a wine cellar whose walls and ceiling are lustrously adorned by a large, expressionistic canopy painting of swirling natural formations and human figures in ecstatic motion. According to its creator, artist Gérard Garouste, the intention was to pay homage to the athanor—the furnace of alchemical myth—and Fire, Air, Water and Earth—the elements that give life, and, of course, produce glass. “From these four elements,” says Garouste, “is born that tinkling transparency.”

If Garouste’s Alchimie (2003) is the allegorical core of Maison Baccarat, the rest of this famed hôtel particulier exudes an equally bright, unpretentious ethereality. “We take seriously what we do, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” says Maggie Henriquez, who, alongside the acclaimed chef Alain Ducasse, masterminded Maison Baccarat’s 2025 refurbishment. There is a kind of quiet alchemy at work here, one that is quintessentially expressed in Ducasse’s restaurant, where an elevated approach to traditional French countryside cuisine takes its place amidst a grand salon garlanded in Brancusian sculpture and drooping minimalist light fixtures. Ducasse’s term for it: “pret-à-porter de luxe.”

Baccarat’s 2003 relocation to Hôtel Bischoffsheim seems only too right to us now. It’s a suitably opulent Belle-Époque setting for one of the great emblems of nineteenth-century extravagance and refinement. The building was designed by architect Ernest-Paul Sanson, whose Mansartian inflections would later recur in a number of hôtels particuliers in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. In a way, Sanson built the 16th that so many know: stately, a tight-lipped glimpse into courtly grandeur. It’s no coincidence that many of his buildings now house diplomatic embassies. Sanson’s reputation within the Parisian aristocracy of the late nineteenth century was high and wide. Anyone with a taste for fine things, and finer conveniences, ended up at his atelier. Sanson’s buildings all featured modern amenities, especially in their plumbing—which, by nineteenth-century Parisian standards, must have seemed impossibly reliable. What enabled this mechanised proficiency, of course, was that money was no object for a Sanson client—and Ferdinand Bischoffsheim was no different. A banker of Belgian, German and Jewish origin, like the great commissions that had made Baccarat’s name in the decades prior, Bischoffsheim would spare no expense.

In the twentieth century, Hôtel Bischoffsheim became famous for housing a tenor of cultural activity, somewhat less stately but no less venerable. Upon her father’s death, Ferdinand’s granddaughter, Marie-Laure, inherited both mansion and family fortune; she was two years old, and an only child. This life-defining twist of fate set her on the path to which she dedicated her next 65 years: art, culture and patronage. In the 1920s, her home became the epicentre of a certain genre of highbrow avant-gardism. Along with her husband, a scion of the De Noailles family, one of France’s most tenured aristocratic lineages, Marie-Laure crafted a web of associates that reads like the stuff of Parisian art legend: Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Balthus, Jean Cocteau—and that’s just the shortlist. What percentage of significant early modern and Surrealist art these names comprise, it’s impossible to say; one can only wonder at what would’ve become of the avant-garde without the De Noailles’ munificent hands.

Photographs of the Bischoffsheim mansion from that era—a sleek, modern, sequined epoch of jazz and Coco Chanel, furnished in Art Deco understatedness—appear a world away from what Baccarat has since done with the place. Under Henriquez and Ducasse, a certain lost Rococo sophistication has re-emerged. The building no longer belongs to the world of Un chien andalou (1929), but to that of the baronial splendour of the courts of Versailles. Indeed, the commission that made Baccarat’s name arrived from the drawing rooms of King Louis XVIII’s palace in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Soon after, the Baccarat name had become synonymous with the luxury taste all heads of state aspired to. By 1896, Baccarat was a site of pilgrimage for many regnants, including Tsar Nicholas II and his Tsarina, Alexandra, who ordered a 3300-piece crystal candelabra to be perilously carted to their palace in Saint Petersburg. Suddenly, Baccarat was a long way from its early years making window panes and small mirrors.

And yet, somehow, there is a taste of all this in Baccarat’s take on Bischoffsheim: the surreal, the Tsarist, the avant-garde, the aristocratic, the alchemical, and the humbly artisanal. The Tuzla chandelier, whose 9000 pendants and 157 lights earned Baccarat the gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, suggests one kind of approach to living; the Noguchi-esque oak sculptures by Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut suggest something more unassuming. In the dining areas, designed by Aliénor Bechu of Volume ABC under Ducasse’s supervising eye, the atmosphere wrangles high-price luxury into an accessible warmth. Indeed, Maison Baccarat appears much indebted to Ducasse’s Aquitanian origins: in the house’s modest jardin, patrons can sit and enjoy a quiet, dare one say rustic, culinary moment in a sea of clean air—an almost Basque sort of pleasure.

What binds it all together, naturally, are the small touches. Discerning eyes will note the splashes of red spread throughout Maison Baccarat. A Baccarat trademark, it’s a shade that is literally called “Baccarat red.” Achieved by mixing ultra-clear crystal with 24-carat gold powder, although one doesn’t exactly need an athanor to make it, one still wonders how exactly such a shade is produced. But then, that would be to divulge the secret of Baccarat’s unique alchemy.