Ruby, the urban lifestyle brand that IHG Hotels & Resorts bought in 2025, has opened its first hotel in France. Ruby Lilou, in Marseille, has 237 rooms and sits between the Vieux Port and La Joliette, close to Le Panier, the city’s oldest quarter. IHG announced the opening on 5 October 2026.

The design story is the building. Ruby Lilou is a conversion of a former BNP Paribas office, which was restructured instead of being demolished. Trade title Hotel Designs reports that Gensler led the conversion, and French trade publication La Revue des Hôtels says the restructuring followed plans by Gensler and CFCL. IHG’s own release names no design firm and says only that Ruby Group, the independent company that founded the brand, runs development, design and operations at the hotel.

What has been built

The 237 rooms fall into four categories, named Nest, Cosy, Lovely and Wow. La Revue des Hôtels puts them at 14 to 26 square metres. Ruby says the room planning borrows from yacht design: oversized beds, walk-in rainfall showers and blackout curtains in a compact footprint. Rooms also carry Marshall amplifiers and Bluetooth speakers, part of the brand’s music theme.

Public space is concentrated in two places. A bar and café runs 24 hours a day at ground level, and a 300 square metre rooftop terrace looks towards the Mediterranean. The palette draws on lavender fields, sun-bleached stone and the sea, with graphic patterns and bold colour layered over the original structure.

Ruby Yani Workspaces opened alongside the hotel, the first Ruby Workspaces site in France. It offers more than 126 flexible workstations plus private offices, meeting rooms and phone booths. Members can use the hotel’s rooftop. Trade reports of the release put memberships from EUR 60 a month and day passes from EUR 30, with hotel rooms from EUR 130 a night for single occupancy including breakfast.

What the designers and operator say

William Yon, principal and director at Gensler, is quoted by Hotel Designs as saying the project shows the potential of existing buildings to support new uses, and that the team kept the original structure while adding contemporary elements tied to Marseille’s culture.

IHG’s release says the Ruby brand had 42 hotels open or in the pipeline as of the second quarter of 2026, most of them in large European cities, and that it expects more than 120 hotels within a decade. Ruby Frida opened in Stockholm in June 2026, and the brand has signed hotels in Chicago and New York City.

What is not disclosed

Neither IHG nor Ruby Group has given the conversion cost, the construction programme or the split of work between the design firms. The release does not name the property owner. La Revue des Hôtels reports that La Française Real Estate Managers owns the building, having bought it off-plan in 2023, and that the building is connected to the Thassalia marine geothermal network. THD has not seen those points confirmed by the companies.

THD’s reading

  • THD analysis, for owners: the stacking is the lesson. A redundant office floorplate has been split between small hotel rooms above and a paying workspace on lower floors, where deep plans and limited daylight suit desks better than beds. That gives an owner two income lines from one conversion.
  • THD analysis, for operators: rooms of this size only work if the public areas carry the stay. Ruby has put its spend into a 24-hour bar and a rooftop that also serve workspace members, so the same staff and floor area earn across more hours of the day.
  • THD analysis, for developers: keeping the structure avoids demolition time and embodied carbon, but office conversions usually bring awkward column grids and plumbing runs. Four room categories in one building suggest the plan was fitted to the frame, not the other way round. Expect more room-type complexity for revenue teams as a result.
  • THD analysis, for suppliers: with a stated target of more than 120 hotels in a decade and much of that likely to be conversion, the demand is for compact bathroom pods, built-in joinery and furniture that can adapt to irregular bays.