The Little Paris Museum is about that. A small museum where you can see cramps from the daily life of the people of Bucharest from the 19th – 20th centuries.
Bucharest has a museum, a state museum, in the Sutu Palace, that beautiful building on the diagonal of the Intercontinental Hotel. It’s just that there, in a historical monument house, you see mainly how the richest people from Bucharest lived in the past. Elegant, fast, opulent, art. These exhibits are always combined there with different galleries, and sometimes we see them right on the sidewalk fence.
In Bucharest, however, with the exception of the Little Paris Museum in the Old Center, there is no other place (at least as far as we know) that presents the daily life of those who were in the middle class, merchants, craftsmen, businessmen, lawyers, engineers, of those who were in the working class in the city. Because every city has a way of life, a typology of constructions, decorations, interior furniture, clothes or things that most inhabitants use. And if the very rich had palaces, the others had such apartments.
And Bucharest, at the confluence with Turkey, Russia and Western Europe, gathered everything it thought was interesting, painted some of them, adapting them to the society of that time, and took them home, in clothes, in everyday life. by day. The Ottoman period, when Turkish things were in vogue or the French one in which we tried to take over everything that was French, is as present in the history of Bucharest as it is today when we became Americanized.
There are also in Romania, there have always been passionate people that people probably consider eccentric. As a private person opened a Dracula Museum in Bucharest, another private person, after collecting 30 years of various antiques of all kinds, decided to set up a museum dedicated to Bucharest, a museum he called Little Paris.
The museum is in the center of the old center, on the floor of a house that belonged, among others, to a Jewish model man who had the store on the ground floor (by a lucky coincidence, there and now another such store is) in a house which belonged to the Dalles family who donated it to the Bucharest City Hall, which in turn rented it to three families at a time during communism so that it could now become the private property and museum of Little Paris again.
Three years of renovations and redecorations have brought back to the space the atmosphere of yesteryear and even if it is an eclectic mixture of objects from several countries and periods, you understand somewhat the daily life of those who lived in Bucharest in those times.
I was recently reading about the fact that today the rich build huge houses, of extraordinary luxury but do not have the education of the upper class. In the old days, you didn’t need to be in the upper class to know that servants can’t enter through the same door as the owners, that service spaces such as the kitchen, bathroom or various rooms do not take place near spacious living rooms or elegant living rooms. you need a hallway at the entrance so as not to carry dirt everywhere in the house and even if the totally open spaces have their charm, the hallways have their purpose which is more important.
Hallway to service spaces
The space at the Little Paris Museum is compartmentalized exactly according to the trend of that time. As I said above. With a large main entrance, a service staircase for others, separate rest and sleep areas, the owner’s office in the middle and separate day and evening lounges. Even this arrangement shows the way of life by the fact that there are large rooms and there is no space saving now.
The museum is divided into the Oriental Salon, the French Salon, the two rest areas one are a lot of objects, the front desk and the bathroom that really looks special and special. In the oriental salon there are, as it is also called, objects related to Turkey, China, Japan, India, North African countries and the atmosphere is so… oriental late. But the French want opulent and aristocratic, elegant and lavish.
Within the museum there is also a photo workshop where photo sessions with vintage costumes are made, even the photos being made on paper, in vintage style.
But what caught my attention was the museum’s offer. A tea, a coffee, a romantic dinner or a party. All can take place in the museum. I find it really special!
The Little Paris Museum is not a big museum, it is rather an exhibition of all kinds of things, a collection that spans two centuries and reminds people of the real way. Certainly, more tourists than Bucharestians have seen this museum, that’s why they should go and see it. It’s a 20 lei ticket, it’s almost always open and can be visited in a maximum of one hour if you keep an eye on it.
Drink a beer or a coffee less on a terrace in the Old Center and you have time and money to go and see it.
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