Underground & cool · Artists' studios in a cold-store · € · 13e · Chinatown & Butte-aux-Cailles
Les Frigos
A 1920s refrigerated railway warehouse squatted by artists in the 1980s, now roughly 80 studios behind corridors layered in graffiti, over 7,000 m² along the Seine. The ground-floor L'Aiguillage gallery shows year-round.
Booking through this link may earn par.is a commission. Same price as anywhere.
Studios open to the public for the late-May portes ouvertes; outside those, visits are by appointment. The hidden canteen-bar is part of the draw.
Getting there
- Bibliothèque François Mitterrand Emile Durkheim14RER C290 m · 5 min walk
- Cour Saint-Emilion14570 m · 11 min walk
- Quai de la Gare6800 m · 15 min walk
Within a few minutes' walk
Where to stay near Les Frigos
- Urban Bivouac HotelBudget boutique hotel€€ · 19 minA 32-room three-star in Tolbiac, six floors of compact, well-resolved rooms that make a virtue of small footprints. A few minutes from Olympiades on line 14, at prices that undercut most of the central 13th.
- Le Quartier Bercy SquareBoutique hotel€€ · 25 minA townhouse set back from the boulevard behind its own private garden, with 57 rooms that all face the green rather than the street. Walking distance to Bercy Village and Gare de Lyon, one of the calmer addresses in the 12th.
- OFF Paris SeineFloating hotel€€€ · 31 minA barge built from two catamaran hulls and moored below Gare d'Austerlitz, with 58 rooms arranged around a glass-roofed plunge pool that opens to the river on one side. The only hotel here where the floor is technically the Seine.
Booking through this link may earn par.is a commission. Same price as anywhere.
The district · 13e
Chinatown & Butte-aux-Cailles — Asia and street artParis's Chinatown of tower blocks and excellent Southeast-Asian kitchens, the village-like Butte-aux-Cailles with its Art-Deco pool, and a riverfront of street-art murals and barge clubs.
Best for: Eaters chasing pho and bo bun, and anyone bored of the centre.
Everything we've verified in the 13e →How we verified this
Confirmed currently operating as of October 2026 (researched by hand on 2026-10-01: Open: own site les-frigos.fr 301-redirects to lesfrigosdeparis.com (live, official), which announces Journees Nationales des Artistes '2, 3 et 4 octobre 2026 de 14h00 a 19h00' and hours 'lundi-Samedi 14h-19h'; Time Out Paris + Le Bonbon covered the 30-31 May 2026 portes ouvertes. The flag was a false positive: the only OSM match was node/4424296661 'Paris/Frigos/24', a defunct Autolib' car-share bay (disused:amenity=car_sharing, operator=Autolib'), not the venue),cross-checked against 1 source:
The full verification ledger — everything checked this week, and what we marked closed →More underground & cool, nearest first
par.is is a living map of Paris. Every place here is a real, currently operating destination — re-checked over time and removed the moment we can no longer confirm it's open. No paid placements, no scraped directory: just opinionated picks worth your trip.