Mondrian Bordeaux Les Carmes is located in Bordeaux’s historic Chartrons district, and offers a Japanese-inspired restaurant led by famed chef Masaharu Morimoto and a host of wellness facilities.
The project was led by real estate group Pichet and lifestyle hospitality company Ennismore, with Philippe Starck as architectural designer and artistic director.
The 97 rooms and suites have been designed by Starck as “cocoons”, focusing on natural materials, with leather seats, wooden doors, boiled wool curtains and a palette of earthy colours. Several rooms and suites open onto private terraces, and two of the hotel’s suites can be connected for special events, giving access to a terrace on the building’s roof-facade.
The 180-seat Restaurant Morimoto Bordeaux is overseen by Japanese chef Masaharu Morimoto, famed for starring in Iron Chef and Iron Chef America. The restaurant includes a bar serving cocktails, spirits and fine wines, as well as sake and Japanese beer, and the Starck-designed interiors feature Bordeaux brick columns and glassed-in wine cellars.
Le Mondrian Bordeaux Les Carmes’ wellness area offers a pool, hammam, sauna and fitness room, and the spa boasts four treatment cabins. Targeted beauty rituals are described as “ancestral, serenity or slimming”, and treatments include foot reflexology, Japanese bodywork therapy shiatsu, relaxation method sophrology and guided meditation sessions. The hotel has partnered with the contemporary French vegan cosmetology brand Codage for its beauty and wellbeing offer.
Mondrian Bordeaux Les Carmes has, according to Philippe Starck, "the refinement of an oxymoron". He continued: "We are in the presence of extremely graceful architecture dating from 1870, which belongs in the tradition of Bordeaux’s chartreuses and is, at the same time, somewhat strange. Even stranger things are going to happen here: fertile encounters that are more the result of a collision than of a bourgeois desire to attune. And so begin the optical and mental games that are so dear to me.”
