Hôtel Le Garage — The Garage That Kept Its Arches

Most conversions face the same question. How much of what came before gets left behind.

Here, quite a lot.

It Started With Movement

An old carriage shed, remodelled and enlarged in 1912 to temporarily house the headquarters of the Biarritz Aero Club, predecessor to the Aéro-Club Basque.

The timing tracks the town. Biarritz had already made itself one of Europe's great resorts, built on royalty and the Atlantic. The new century brought a different kind of glamour. Aviation. Engineering. Speed.

The motor car followed close behind.

In 1930, Robert Barenne took over the building and turned it into a private garage for guests of the Régina hotel opposite. Not ordinary hotel cars. Wealthy visitors arrived in Rolls-Royces and prestigious American automobiles, stored here while their owners slept across the road.

After the war it stayed a working garage. An Esso petrol station ran on site until the end of the 1960s.

Thirty Years Behind Closed Doors

By the early 1980s, pieces of its aviation past were still sitting in the workshop lockers. Gnome aircraft engine parts, old flight instruments, eventually handed to a regional aeronautical museum.

Then the building stopped.

For around thirty years, Le Garage stayed closed, left largely as it had been. Biarritz kept moving around it — surf culture, hotel renovations, a changing tourism map. Le Garage simply waited.

The Purple Interruption

In 2018, the doors opened again. Colorama turned roughly 900 square metres of the abandoned garage into a temporary street-art exhibition, twenty artists working to a single theme: purple.

An odd interruption for a building built on machinery and petrol. After decades of silence, the old workshop briefly became a canvas.

Two years later, the idea of a hotel took hold. The renovation ran ten months.

Keeping the Garage

Designers Agnès Guiot and Pauline Minsé had an unusual building to work with, and used its industrial character as the starting point rather than something to erase.

Concrete, terrazzo, unfinished wood, steel, softened by woven fabrics and retro fittings. Deep blues and sea greens for the Atlantic outside. Terracotta and pink for warmth.

The arches stay central. Their shape repeats through the hotel; the large glazed openings keep something of the scale a building needs when its traffic once arrived on four wheels.

Historical without becoming themed. No steering wheels mounted on walls. No attempt to recreate a 1930s workshop. The history sits in proportion and material instead — the same instinct behind The BoTree on the old Welbeck Street car park and Hotel SP34 in Copenhagen.

What's There Now

Twenty-seven rooms and suites behind the arches. Even the smallest category, Cosy, starts at 27 square metres; larger rooms add private terraces, patios, gardens or ocean views.

A swimming pool sits among greenery outside. The hotel is on Avenue de l'Impératrice, close to Miramar beach, Biarritz lighthouse and Golf du Phare — the Régina still standing directly opposite.

That relationship is the neatest part of the whole story. A century ago, wealthy guests slept at the Régina while their Rolls-Royces slept at Le Garage. Now both buildings take guests.

Another Version of Biarritz

Biarritz is good at preserving its grand narrative. Napoleon III. Empress Eugénie. Villas, casinos, Belle Époque hotels facing the Atlantic.

Le Garage tells a different version — the technologies that changed how those visitors actually travelled. Aviation first, then the automobile. A surviving fragment of the infrastructure behind Biarritz's arrival into the modern age, not just its ballrooms.

Why It Earns Its Place

Converted hotels often manufacture a story around whatever the building used to be. This one doesn't need to.

The aero club happened here. The Rolls-Royces were parked here. The mechanics worked here. The building really did stay closed for decades. The artists really did cover it in purple before anyone checked in.

The smartest decision was leaving it alone. The cars have gone. The guests have crossed the road. The arches are still doing their job. The rest of Edit No.27, France, Facing the Atlantic, follows the same shoreline.