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Category / Editor’s Picks

Welcome to One of the Last Cinema Prop Houses in Paris

Alright, you can forget about all those other times, this time, I really did find Paris’ best-kept secret. It’s taken me almost a year to gain access to the 4,000 square meter prop house hidden in central Paris, one of the last three to still survive within the city. After several attempts at emailing them, I luckily discovered that I have…

Armenian Soul Food at a Secret Paris Restaurant

Behind an unmarked door in the 9th arrondissement, at the back of peaceful courtyard, I found another Paris secret. The kind of place that you would only hear about via word of mouth, I heard about it from a guy in a bar one night who was teasing a few of his favourite local secrets after one too many…

The World’s First Sex Therapist and his Temple of Hymen

Self-styled Scottish ‘doctor’ James Graham may not have been the original snake oil salesman but he wasn’t far from it. The ultimate eccentric showman who spotted innumerable untapped business opportunities in the sex industry, James Graham gleefully administered a cocktail of somewhat questionable, shall we say, ‘fertility treatments’ to his well-to-do aristocratic patients, who were…

Time Travel to a 1930s Dance School in Paris

“Forget your troubles and dance” were the wonderful lyrics once sang by Bob Marley and he wasn’t far wrong as we stepped into an old dance school that sits quietly at the bottom of a paved courtyard in Saint Germain. (7th arr) Not to be fooled though as the seemingly quiet exterior says nothing about…

Your Ticket Aboard the World’s First Cruise Ship

Let’s take a cruise through history (see what I did there) aboard the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise, a German passenger ship of the Hamburg-America Line launched in 1900 and credited with having been the first purpose-built cruise ship. It only spent six years in service before it was accidentally grounded off the coast of Jamaica (oops),…

The Little-Known Paris Jewel Box of Curiosities

“Take the right hallway to the staircase, which will take you to another staircase, that will lead you to a doorbell on the first floor” – the exact instructions to finding the Museum of Mineralogy tucked away in the university of MINES Paris Tech. Paris hides one of its most inspiring cabinets of curiosity behind university walls…

We went on a Picnic in a Parisian Nazi Bunker

I‘ve been on some adventures in my lifetime, but none of them ended with a candlelit banquet in an abandoned Nazi bunker. And it is with great pleasure that I finally get to share this surreal experience with you. The idea began with the proposal of a picnic with a few friends, somewhere a little…

Inside the Lost “Harvard” of Paris

Gustave Eiffel, the Michelin brothers, the Peugeot family– they were all educated by one of the oldest, most prestigious universities in France– which no longer exists. In its heyday, this ‘Harvard of Paris’ was housed in an extraordinary 17th century Parisian mansion, one that if you’ve been to Paris, you’re most likely very well-acquainted with. You see,…

Behind the Gates of Paris’ Most Secret Street

A microcosm of secrecy, high-society, and spookiness mingles behind a black gate, warning voie privée (private road) on Avenue Frochot in Pigalle. This dead-end street, inaccessible to the public, hides fairytale neo-Renaissance villas behind wisteria trees and rose bushes. Marked by an elaborate stained glass window of an old 1930s cabaret to the left of the entrance,…

When Buffalo Bill was the Toast of Paris

Americans in Paris. Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Jim Morrison, James Baldwin, Nina Simone – these are the names and faces that typically come to mind when we think of those who left their mark on the French capital. But a bison-chasing cowboy doesn’t exactly fit the profile of the American intellectuals, writers, artists and musicians who…

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