The hotel of the emblematic Pleyel tower in Seine-Saint-Denis opens four days before the 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 old office tower has emerged from six years of work intended to reconvert it into a luxury hotel.

“This ambitious challenge, which seemed crazy to many, opens an alternative path to real estate: the reconversion of use and the creation of open-plan concepts to offer a new future to emblematic buildings while respecting their identity,” declared in a press release Boris Litty, general manager of Financière des Quatre Rives, pilot of the project.

Operated by the German operator H-Hotel, the H4 Hotel Wyndham offers 697 rooms at the foot of Saint-Denis-Pleyel station, the future hub of the Grand Paris Express where four metro lines will meet by 2030.

Postponed several times during the spring, the opening of the hotel comes just a few days before the start of the 2024 Olympics (July 26-August 11). Located a stone's throw from the Olympic Village, the establishment will particularly welcome athletes breastfeeding their children during the Games.

Taking its name from the Pleyel piano factory which preceded it on this location, the tower built in the early 1970s, when towers were in vogue, was originally only the west building of a planned complex of four similar rounds. 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 before being adorned with a new white facade. For several months, its bare skeleton even made it possible to see through it, a photogenic post-industrial setting which has been the delight of several rap videos.