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Auberge Saint-Antoine, Québec City

publication date: Apr 1, 2008
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author/source: Polly Evans
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I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels, but few have grabbed me like this one. At first glance, it’s suitably elegant and eclectic – sofas, armchairs and blazing fires welcome guests in from the winter snows (they’ve had five metres in Quebec this year), but unlike in most hotel lobbies, here the guests are actually lounging on them, reading books and magazines and sipping from generous goblets of red wine.
 
There are plenty of comfortable hotels in the world, however. The Auberge Saint-Antoine really succeeds because it blends its luxury with a truly original and intriguing approach to the history of the land on which it sits.
 
Québec City was founded four hundred years ago, in 1608, as a French territory. It wasn’t long before the English came banging on the door, though – this was a strategic point for the trading of lucrative furs. And so the French built defensive walls from which to fire their cannons. The old city walls on which these cannons sat dissect the site of the current hotel, and the architects have incorporated them to brilliant effect. In the hotel’s entrance hall, models of buildings in boxes inset into the wall show the development of the site from the early days of Québec City to the present. Push a button and a light projection displays the contour of the present hotel’s buildings over the old ones, and the city walls.
 
Take a few steps down into the open-plan bar and you’ll see through a glass wall the illuminated ruins of the defensive wall, mounted with a French cannon (these are rare) and an English cannon ball (rather more common) onto which is still fused the blasted wood at which it was fired. They stand as historical artefacts, but they’re displayed as modern art. Across the floor of the bar, amid the tables and armchairs where well-heeled visitors sip cocktails, flagstones that match the wall draw a line showing where these cannons were once positioned.
 
Many men constructed many different buildings on this site over hundreds of years – as the models in the entranceway show. And so, before starting construction of this latest one, the hotel’s owners agreed to an archaeological dig. The artefacts that they found now form the entire artwork of the hotel. The concierge’s desk is made from an ancient timber that the archaeologists discovered; the decoration of the rest of the reception area was created to blend. Elsewhere in the hotel, porcelain vases and shards of decorative glass are lit in cases inset into the walls.
 
Each floor of the hotel is dedicated to one man who operated the site during a period of its history – like layers of sediment, the oldest lie at the bottom, the most recent at the top – and the decoration of each room uses pieces found in the archaeological dig that relates to the floor’s era.
 
My bedroom was called the Chambre des Moissons, after a type of iridescent glass that was sold between 1910 and 1930. A cabinet by the lift told the story of the man who had owned the site during this period while, in the bedside table, an inset case illuminated a jagged pink shard, and a leaflet left in the room explained its history. It was a thoughtful and original way of presenting the people and stories behind this unique, elegant property.
 
Getting there: For more details on the Auberge Saint-Antoine go to www.saint-antoine.com.