Philippe Starck Tops Hotel in France With This Surrealist 19th Century Home

What do you get when you mix a quaint 19th-century French home with a towering glass monolith? A fever dream? A time-traveling airship?

Nope—Maison Heler, the delightfully bizarre brainchild of design icon Philippe Starck.

Hovering 45 meters above Metz, France, this surreal hotel stacks a postcard-perfect Alsatian house atop a shimmering tower like it’s the world’s most elegant Jenga game. Shutters, pitched roof, a little garden—it’s all there. Just… floating.

Starck calls it “an imaginary building from a dream,” and honestly, that tracks. It feels like something a very chic ghost would build. Or a Wes Anderson character with a generous budget and access to cranes.

The new construction comes to life with a juxtaposition of materials, and the addition of hanging plantings, which give a sense of age and grace.

“Maison Heler was born of a surreal, poetic tale I imagined. It is a hotel conceived as a habitable work of art, a literary principle crystallized in matter.”
-Philippe Starck

Inside, it’s modern luxury with Starck’s signature weird-but-wonderful flourishes. But it’s the silhouette—storybook charm meets space-age stilts—that steals the show.

The hotel, the Maison Heler, is part of the Curio Collection by Hilton. Rates start at 161€ per night. Learn more and book now on the Hilton website.

The hotel’s interior has unique touches that let guests know they’re not in just any hotel. There’s a sense of surrealism that abounds.

We love projects like this that fly in the face of ordinary, and prove that creativity and a bit of bizarre in the world of architecture is a good thing.