SINCE 1885
LES BAINS GUERBOIS: ONE PLACE, MANY LIVES
From private baths to nightclub, from hotel to perfume.
Before talking about perfume, we have to talk about the place. Les Bains Guerbois was born at 7 rue du Bourg l’Abbé in 1885, long before it became a perfume house. This place, its many lives, the people who passed through it, its architecture, its nights, its excesses and its memories still feed everything we create today. Our perfumes do not come from a story invented for them. They come from a story that was already there.
Since 1885, the place has changed its face several times without losing what makes it unique: a certain way of mixing pleasure, creation and freedom. The nineteenth-century baths gave way to the nights of Les Bains Douches, then to the hotel Les Bains Paris. More than a century after the first baths opened, this story has become the raw material of perfume.
1885, LES BAINS GUERBOIS
In 1885, Auguste Guerbois opened a private bathhouse at 7 rue du Bourg l’Abbé that quickly became a notable address in Parisian life. People came for the baths, of course, but also for everything else the place already offered: comfort, care, sociability and a very open form of pleasure. Monet, Renoir, Zola and Proust are among the artists and writers that the history of Les Bains has remembered.
From this first life, something took shape that would run through all the ones that followed. Les Bains has never been just a setting. It is a place where people come to experience something.
“When one has visited Les Bains Guerbois and thinks back to the old establishments of this kind that existed in old Paris, one is amazed by the luxury and comfort to be found there.”
1978, LES BAINS DOUCHES
Nearly a century later, 7 rue du Bourg l’Abbé changed its rhythm completely. Jacques Renault and Fabrice Coat turned the old baths into a hybrid venue: club, restaurant, bar and concert hall all at once. Philippe Starck, then at the start of his career, worked on the interior.
On 21 December 1978, Les Bains Douches opened its doors. For that first night, Philippe Starck staged a radical scene: artificial snow in the street, the Russian alphabet, a red flag plunged into a blood-coloured pool. Pierre et Gilles designed the invitation card. More than 2,000 people crowded into 7 rue du Bourg l’Abbé. A second life began.
For more than thirty years, Les Bains Douches was one of the emblematic places of Parisian nightlife. People danced and dined there, but they also came for the music. Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and Prince, among others, played or performed there. Andy Warhol, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, David Bowie, Naomi Campbell and Thierry Mugler were among its regulars. Later, a young David Guetta DJed there regularly, long before his international career.
But reducing Les Bains to a list of those who walked through its door would miss the point. What makes the place is the mix: artists who were already famous and others who were not yet, fashion and music, Paris and the wider world, elegance and a certain kind of disorder. Les Bains welcomed the celebrities of the day, but also those who were still on their way to becoming one.
Jean-Pierre Marois grew up with this story. Les Bains was part of his landscape long before he ever imagined bringing it back to life.
“In the 80s and 90s, Les Bains Douches was the Studio 54 of Paris”
2015, LES BAINS PARIS
After the club closed, Jean-Pierre Marois took over the place and chose to give it a new life. It would have been easy to turn Les Bains into a monument to its own legend. He preferred to set it in motion again.
In 2015, 7 rue du Bourg l’Abbé became Les Bains Paris. Hotel, restaurant, bar, club, a place for meeting and creating: the project keeps some obvious traces of the past without trying to recreate it. The checkerboard, the pool and a few familiar signs are still there, but Les Bains is not a museum of the 1980s. Jean-Pierre wanted a living place, able to welcome its own era just as the previous ones had welcomed theirs.
It was in this new life that perfume would appear. Not as a brand extension planned in advance, but almost by accident.
2016, A SCENT SIGNATURE FOR THE HOTEL
In 2016, Jean-Pierre wanted to give Les Bains Paris a true scent signature. He turned to perfumer Dorothée Piot with an idea in mind: to imagine a scent that would sit somewhere between the sacred and the carnal, between the incense of a chapel and the sensuality of a place of pleasure.
The brief was already very Les Bains. It did not describe a list of materials to use, but an atmosphere to translate. Over the trials, Jean-Pierre discovered the work of perfumery: the exchanges, the hesitations, the corrections and above all that very particular way of creating as a pair. He brings an image, a memory, a sensation. The perfumer answers with materials, memory and a language of their own. The initial idea moves, becomes clearer, sometimes changes completely.
Jean-Pierre was hooked. Above all, this first collaboration revealed a way of creating that suited him: four hands working together, artistic direction and perfumer, without either trying to do the other’s job. What was meant to be a hotel’s scent signature became the starting point of a much wider adventure.
2018, A FIRST COLLECTION OF PERFUMES
Two years later, Jean-Pierre decided to continue this work and to bring Les Bains Guerbois back to life as a perfume house. The project did not come from a market study meant to prove that perfumery was missing a new brand. It came first from a desire: to keep telling the story of the place through scent.
The name came naturally: Les Bains Guerbois, the name from 1885. The first collection also found its principle in the history of the place. Une Date, Une Histoire starts from precise moments in the life of Les Bains. A year, an era, an atmosphere become the starting point of a perfume. It is never about literally recreating a scent from the past. The date opens a door; the perfumer then decides where it leads.
1885, 1978, 1979, 1992, 2015: the dates are not there to feed nostalgia. They provide material to interpret. Jean-Pierre gives an artistic direction, sometimes an image, a piece of music, a colour, a sensation or a few words. The perfumer receives this story and translates it freely.
2022, THE “FORMES & MATIÈRES” COLLECTION
In 2022, Les Bains Guerbois opened a second chapter with the Formes & Matières collection. If Une Date, Une Histoire explores the place through time, this new collection chooses to look at it differently: through its architecture, its volumes, its surfaces and its materials.
The checkerboard, wood, lacquer, contrasting materials or plays of light can in turn become starting points. Here again, the perfumer is never asked to illustrate a material literally. They are given a direction, then left free to interpret it.
This freedom also explains the diversity of the house’s perfumes. They do not all try to speak with the same voice. They share a way of creating, not a recipe.
BACCHUS, WITNESS TO EVERY LIFE OF LES BAINS
When Les Bains Guerbois became a perfume house, it had no need to invent an emblem. It had been there since 1885.
Auguste Guerbois had chosen Bacchus, god of wine, celebration and pleasure, to welcome those who came through the door of Les Bains. His face looks down from the porch of 7 rue du Bourg l’Abbé. The choice already says a great deal about the spirit of the place: people come to Les Bains to take care of themselves, but also to find pleasure there.
Bacchus has since watched every life of the place go by. He welcomed the clients of the Bains Guerbois of 1885, then the dancers and party-goers of Les Bains Douches, and today the guests of the hotel Les Bains Paris. The setting has changed, and so have the customs. He has stayed.
His face now appears on the cap of every Les Bains Guerbois bottle. Not as a logo invented for perfumery, but as a reminder of what has run through the history of the place from the very beginning. When you remove the cap before putting on your perfume, Bacchus is still there, like an invitation to think that the next spray should also be a pleasure.
JEAN-PIERRE MAROIS, FOUNDER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Jean-Pierre Marois did not come to perfumery through perfume. He came to it through Les Bains. After bringing the place back to life in 2015, it was the search for a scent signature for the hotel that introduced him, the following year, to working with a perfumer. This first experience with Dorothée Piot quickly became a passion, then, in 2018, a perfume house.
Jean-Pierre has been its artistic director ever since. His role is not to dictate a formula or to choose a sequence of ingredients. He starts from a story, a date, an image, a piece of music, sometimes a sensation that is hard to describe. The perfumer takes hold of it, moves it somewhere else and gives it a scent.
This way of working probably owes as much to his relationship with Les Bains as to perfumery itself. For Jean-Pierre, the place has never been something to keep under glass. Each era must be able to offer its own interpretation of it.
“Les Bains Guerbois is an adventure that captivates me. Spanning three centuries, it has found its breath again like never before. A breath in which exquisite and unprecedented scents mingle, thanks to the great perfumers we have been inviting since 2018 to turn the great dates of our house into perfumes. A unique, strong and eclectic Parisian story that rhymes with well-being, celebration, creativity and a thousand other things.”
LETTING THE PERFUMER GO FURTHER
Across the collections, Jean-Pierre works with perfumers whose styles are very different: Michel Almairac, Fanny Bal, Bertrand Duchaufour, Jérôme Epinette, Mathieu Nardin, Dorothée Piot, Dominique Ropion and Jean-Claude Ellena.
What they have in common is not that they were asked to reproduce a Les Bains scent signature. It is almost the opposite. The brief gives a framework, a story or a sensation, but not an answer. It does not impose a material because it is fashionable, nor a formula designed to tick the boxes of a marketing positioning. The perfumer has their own palette and their own writing.
Jean-Pierre loves the moment when the project slips a little out of his hands. When the perfumer comes back with something he had not imagined, yet which tells the story exactly.
We do not ask perfumers to prove us right. We ask them to take us somewhere we would not have gone alone.
This is probably where the essence of Les Bains Guerbois still lies today. The place has been private baths, a nightclub, a hotel. It has become the material of perfume without ceasing to be everything that came before it. Each new creation adds a story to the others rather than replacing them.
Since 1885, Les Bains has changed lives several times. It has never stopped being a place of pleasure and creation.