There is perhaps no better season to return to Paris than the moment the city begins to change. Late-summer afternoons give way to September’s first cool evenings, the fashion world arrives, galleries and museums unveil their fall programs, and Paris resumes its particular rhythm of exhibitions, dinners, openings, and long walks between them all.
For travelers looking for an address that feels inseparable from the city itself, Maison Proust offers something more transporting than a place to stay. Tucked into the Marais, the five-star boutique hotel was conceived as a richly layered homage to Marcel Proust and the Belle Époque world that informed his writing. Its 23 rooms and suites, salons, library, winter garden, and spa create an experience that moves between literature and interior design, history and fantasy.
Now, a remarkable new decorative work at the hotel’s front desk and concierge area offers another reason to step inside.
A Mural Inspired by Marcel Proust’s Herbarium
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
The new hand-painted mural is the result of a collaboration between French decorative artist Delphine Nény and Atelier Bedo le Peley, led by artist Benoît Desclos le Peley. What makes the project especially compelling is its starting point: six months of research into Marcel Proust’s herbarium.
The result is not simply a decorative flourish, but a work that extends the hotel’s central premise. Maison Proust has always approached literature as something spatial and sensory. Here, the botanical world associated with Proust becomes a visual landscape, translating research and literary history into a contemporary work of decorative art.
Created as a “four-hand” painting, the composition employs the traditional technique of verre églomisé, or reverse painting on glass. Gold, palladium, other metallic leaf, pearl powders, mica, and metallic pigments are applied to the reverse side of the glass, which then becomes both the support for the painting and a protective surface.
There is something particularly fitting about placing such a work at the threshold of the hotel. Before guests disappear into the dark wood-paneled salons and Belle Époque interiors, they encounter a surface that changes the traditional relationship between painting and decoration. Light catches the glass and metallic materials, allowing the work to shift with movement and perspective.
Two Masters of French Decorative Art
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
For Delphine Nény, the project continues a practice devoted to preserving and reinventing the language of decorative painting. A Meilleur Ouvrier de France in decorative painting and a Maître Artisan, Nény is known for creating ornamental panels, trompe-l’œil, murals, and reinterpretations of historic decorative schemes for settings ranging from private residences to hotels and historic properties.
Her work is grounded in traditional craftsmanship but shaped by the specific history and atmosphere of each site. That sensitivity makes Maison Proust a natural setting for her approach: this is a hotel where every decorative gesture is already part of a larger story.
Atelier Bedo le Peley, meanwhile, is known for equally ambitious decorative creations that bring together the aesthetics of 18th- and 19th-century France with trompe-l’œil, panoramic wallpaper, frescoes, and reverse painting on glass.
Benoît Desclos le Peley has developed a particular relationship with fixed-under-glass painting, a technique that requires the composition to be conceived and executed in reverse. His use of glass and metallic materials allows his works to interact with changing light, creating surfaces that can appear to shift throughout the day.
Together, Nény and Desclos le Peley bring two complementary approaches to the Maison Proust commission: historical knowledge and decorative precision, craftsmanship and theatricality, research and visual invention.
The Most Parisian Address for the Season Ahead
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
The mural also feels perfectly timed for the season. Paris in September and October is a city of layers: fashion week crowds spilling into cafés, collectors and curators arriving for the fall art calendar, and the first instinct to retreat indoors as evenings become cooler.
Maison Proust offers its own version of that layered experience. Designed by Jacques Garcia, the hotel draws on the aristocratic salons and artistic world of the Belle Époque, filling its interiors with period furnishings, paintings, rare books, and objects that connect directly to Proust and his milieu. The collection includes an autographed copy of Remembrance of Things Past, a letter from Proust, and works by artists including Jacques-Émile Blanche and Jean Béraud.
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
The hotel’s art collection extends throughout the rooms and suites, where historic paintings are paired with the personalities, writers, artists, and social figures who populated Proust’s world. Explore Maison Proust’s art collection
That makes the new mural feel less like an addition than another chapter. At Maison Proust, literature does not remain on the page. It appears in paintings, architecture, cocktails inspired by the madeleine, rooms named for figures from Proust’s era, and now, in a luminous botanical work born from the writer’s own herbarium.
For a late-summer escape or a fall trip built around fashion, art, and the enduring pleasure of Paris, it is a reminder that the city’s most memorable experiences are often found in places where the past is not simply preserved, but made newly alive.
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
Cocktail Marquise de Villeparisis, Courtesy of Maison Proust Paris.
