In Seine-Saint-Denis, the transformation of the emblematic Pleyel Tower for the 2024 Olympics

With its massive silhouette of 144 meters high, the oblong skyscraper, visible from miles around, overlooks the plain of Saint-Denis and constitutes a landmark well known to the inhabitants of the department.

In disrepair for several decades, accused of defacing the landscape, the office tower is finally reaching the end of six years of work, completing its rebirth as a four-star hotel. The establishment is scheduled to open its doors in the spring, just before the Summer Olympics (July 26-August 11).

“We discovered that the North-East of Paris has a deficit of more than 5.000 hotel rooms,” explains Boris Litty, general manager of Financière des Quatre Rives, who is supervising the project for the new owner of the premises, the company Strasbourg insurance Afi Esca.

"As it was a large carrier, we added a conference center to it in order to create a virtuous economic circle. It makes it possible to attract international seminars and conferences which fill the hotel. And because there is hotel, there will be seminars. The idea is to have created an industrial hotel tool", explains the father of the project, who has been working on it since 2007.

If the exterior work is generally completed, inside, the construction site is in full swing. Slabs are piling up in the rooms under construction, the false ceilings have not yet been installed. Mounted on baskets, workers in fluorescent jackets are busy.

For its first establishment in France, the German group H-Hotels will open a 697-room hotel within these walls, with rates ranging from 188 to 1.600 euros per night. Bar and swimming pool with a 360° view of the Seine-Saint-Denis and Paris will be located on the 40th and top floor, just under the famous giant rotating logo which tops the Pleyel Tower and has earned it, depending on the era and the advertisers, the names “Siemens tower” or “Philips tower”.

Greater Paris Hub

The new complex is banking on the fact that the district, today without much urban coherence, asserts itself as a hub of Greater Paris.

At the foot of the skyscraper, the construction site of the Saint-Denis-Pleyel station is teeming, where by 2030 four lines of the Grand Paris Express will meet, including line 14 linking the center of Paris and Orly, as well as line 17 going to Roissy.

Between the airline cabin crew, the numerous campuses of large companies located in Saint-Denis and the concerts and sports competitions at the nearby Stade de France, the developers are hoping for a hotel occupancy rate of around 80%. .

Taking its name from the Pleyel piano factory which preceded it on this location, the immense monolith built in the early 1970s, at a time when towers were in vogue, was originally only the west building of 'a planned set of four similar towers. A project stopped dead by the oil crisis of 1973.

To refinance, the developer at the time sold the building piecemeal. The Corten steel of its facade, which gave it its original black color, even rusted over time, giving it a decrepit appearance which required the installation of a curtain wall as a cover in the 1980s. -misery.

For the purposes of the renovation, the tower was completely emptied and cleaned. For several months, his bare skeleton even allowed us to see through it. A photogenic post-industrial setting that has been the subject of several rap videos.

For its comeback, the Pleyel Tower is now dressed all in white. “The tower had a history,” explains Sretchko Markovic, the architect of the renovation, “we customized it a little but we had to stay with the same initial ideas, because we must not distort the object ".