Butterfly Pâtisserie at the Rosewood Hôtel de Crillon: An End Grain Oak Floor

Butterfly Pâtisserie is the pastry shop of the Hôtel de Crillon, the Rosewood hotel in Paris. Its interior was designed by Tristan Auer and completed in 2023, and its floor is Opus, the OscarOno Paris endgrain oak, in the Natural finish. The photographs are by Amaury Laparra.

The room is small and bright: pale stone walls, white marble counters, glass vitrines and a few mirrored surfaces. The oak is the one warm material in it, and it lies inside the room like a carpet, framed by a pale border along the walls.

Paving, cut from the end of the oak

Opus revives a lost Paris craft, the oak paving of the nineteenth century. The wood is cut across its endgrain, its hardest face, and set as an organic pattern of irregular pieces whose joins disappear into one continuous surface. Up close every piece shows its own growth rings, and no shape is the same as the one beside it.

In a pastry shop the floor is mostly seen from above, looking down past the counter at the cakes. Seen that way, through the glass of the vitrines, the pattern reads at the same scale as the pastries and the veining of the marble: fine and even, rather than a set of boards running toward a wall.

Endgrain is also what makes the floor fit for a room like this. Opus is rated usage class 34, for very heavy commercial traffic, which a hotel shop with guests coming and going all day needs.

Mirrors that double the floor

The plinths of the counters are clad in mirror. Where the oak meets them, the pattern carries on in the reflection, so the floor seems to run on beneath the counters and the room reads larger than it is. Through the doorway, the shop opens onto the hotel's tea room.

For a project of your own, that is worth deciding early. A mirror or a polished plinth set on a floor shows the floor twice, and it shows the line where the two meet first. Opus joints are under 1 mm, and they can be left as they are or filled with LignoFusion in brown or black: next to a mirror, choose knowing the joints will be seen again in the reflection, and keep the edge where floor meets plinth clean and straight.

Opus in Natural, and how to specify it

Opus is an 8 mm endgrain oak top layer on 12 mm birch plywood, made in Natural, Smoke (smoked through the full depth of the oak) and Black (charred, in the shou sugi ban tradition), with no stain. It carries a Cfl-s1 fire rating and is FSC and PEFC certified. Plain boards in the same finish, from the Atelier and Essentiel collections, are made for adjoining rooms and transitions.

Elsewhere in Paris, Opus in Black is laid at Hotel Dame des Arts, designed by Raphael Navot. See the whole project at Hôtel de Crillon, Butterfly Pâtisserie, find spec sheets, CAD and 3D files in the library, and order samples of Opus in Natural to see it in your own light.