There is an Aston Martin dealership at 6–8 Rue de la Cavalerie in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. Walk past the cars, find a small door, take a rickety lift to the seventh floor, and you’ll find one of the most beautiful tennis clubs inspired by a cathedral.
Nothing on the street gives it away, you could walk past it a hundred times and never know a single GreenSet court and 150 paying members sat above you with views of the Eiffel Tower.
The building was designed by Robert Farradèche in 1924, an architect whose name is associated with the lavish, geometric coolness of the Art Deco period. The roof above the court is really what makes it unique. It is a parabolic wooden arch assembled from 1,400 individual pieces of timber arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Each piece carries load, and the whole thing curves overhead like a cathedral
The club was founded in 1927. Among its early members were figures from the golden era of French tennis like Jean Brugnon and the players who became known collectively as the Three Musketeers of French Tennis. The courts they once played on were declared a national monument in 1986. The wooden roof, at some point destroyed, was rebuilt piece by piece to match the original exactly.
The club’s terrace sits between the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro gardens, and the court itself plays on GreenSet which is a hard acrylic surface that is heated through winter. It has Locker rooms with Italian-style showers, a members’ lounge, and a library.
On the terrace just outside the changing rooms, the Eiffel Tower is in full view, and at the right time of the day the light through the translucent roof panels turn the room amber. Membership costs around €1,900 a year for roughly an hour of court time per week, with 150 members total and a very long waitlist.