I night in Oscar Wilde’s bedroom
Pampering Pleasure – Call of the Wilde.
A panoply of pastimes.

Financial Times, 24 March 2007

"Either those curtains go, or I do," Oscar Wilde is said to have quipped on his deathbed at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris. He went – and so did the curtains – but room 16, the room in which Wilde passed away in 1900, is an inhabitable homage to the literary giant. A century on, the Hotel d'Alsace on the left-bank has become L'Hotel, a boutique hotel or "maison de charme". Each room is themed to pay tribute to a moment from the hotel's glorious past or to an eminent guest – Marco Polo, Mistinguett, or the king of Naples, according to your persuasions.
Room 16, on the first floor, has been redecorated in a painstakingly authentic decadent-Victorian style that Wilde would doubtless have been thrilled with: all is dark wood – from panelled walls to ornate cornices and skirting boards – bar a deep turquoise frieze embellished with huge golden peacocks engaged in what appear to be various frisky acts of courtship.

Wildian fripperies adorn the plain marble surfaces: a photo frame fashioned into a theatre curtain (revealing a snap of Wilde in his heyday) and a lamp base sculpted into a reclining literary gentleman. Two imposing bookshelves, artfully stuffed with dusty tomes (a slightly random selection upon inspection) bestride a large fireplace.

As I sat up to my neck in bubbles in the semi-enclosed short-but-deep bathtub, I wondered how Oscar would have gone about his ablutions – coup de champagne in hand and young lad ready to pass him his robe, or shower-capped and singing in solitude? Would he have resisted the temptation of room service? Or stealing the state-of-the art bathroom products? One thing is sure, L'Hotel's menu of Paris-themed DVDs would have foxed him.

The room's musty authenticity and notable lack of mod cons – wide-screen TV excepted –is both charming and eerie; tucked up in the raised kingsize bed, I felt like a child staying at her grandfather's house. A rather flamboyant grandfather, at that.

L'Hotel, 13 rue des Beaux Arts, 75006 Paris, 00 33 1 4441 9900.