5 Best Sights in Western Paris, Paris

It's a shame you can't go inside this house, which is considered the city's first Art Nouveau structure. Dreamed up in 1898 by Hector Guimard, the wild combination of materials and the grimacing grillwork led neighbors to call it Castle Dérangé (Deranged). Yet the project catapulted the 27-year-old Guimard into the public eye, leading to his famous métro commission. After ogling the sea-inspired front entrance, go partway down the alley to admire the inventive treatment of the traditional Parisian courtyard, complete with a melting water fountain. A few blocks up the road at No. 60 is the Hotel Mezzara, designed by Guimard in 1911 for textile designer Paul Mezzara. You can trace Guimard's evolution by walking to the subtler Agar complex at the end of the block. Tucked beside the stone entrance at the corner of Rue Jean de la Fontaine and Rue Gros is a tiny café-bar with an Art Nouveau glass front and furnishings.

First conceived in 1958, this Modernist suburb just west of Paris was inspired by Le Corbusier's dream of tall buildings, pedestrian walkways, and sunken vehicle circulation. Built as an experiment to keep high-rises out of the historic downtown, the Parisian business hub has survived economic uncertainty to become the city's prime financial district. Today, 20,000 people live in the suburb, but 180,000 people work here and many more come to shop in its enormous mall. Arriving via métro Line 1, you'll get a view of the Seine, then emerge at a pedestrian plaza studded with some great public art, including César's giant thumb, Joan Miró's colorful figures, and one of Calder's great red "stabiles." The Grande Arche de La Défense dominates the area; it was designed as a controversial closure to the historic axis of Paris (an imaginary line that runs through the Arc de Triomphe, the Arc du Carrousel, and the Louvre Pyramide), but its top floor is no longer accessible.

The modest home of the great French 19th-century writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) contains exhibits charting his tempestuous yet prolific career. Balzac penned nearly 100 novels and stories known collectively as The Human Comedy, many of them set in Paris. You can still feel his presence in his study and pay homage to his favorite coffeepot—his working hours were fueled by a tremendous consumption of the "black ink." He would escape his creditors by exiting the flat through a secret passage that led down to what is now the Musée du Vin.

Visitors come here to snap pictures of the queen of subway entrances—one of the city's two remaining Art Nouveau canopied originals designed by Hector Guimard (the other is at the Abbesses stop on Line 12). A flamboyant scalloped "crown" of patina-painted panels and runaway metal struts adorns this whimsical 1900 creation. Porte Dauphine is the terminus of Line 2. The entrance is on the Bois de Boulogne side of Avenue Foch, so take the Boulevard de l'Amiral Bruix exit.

This narrow shopping street escaped Haussmann's urban renovations and still retains the country feel of old Auteuil, a sedate bourgeois enclave. Molière once lived on the site of No. 2, and Racine was on nearby Rue du Buis. The pair met up to clink glasses and exchange drama notes at the Mouton Blanc Inn, now a traditional brasserie, at No. 40. Numbers 19–25 and 29 are an interesting combination of 17th- and 18th-century buildings. At the foot of the street, the scaly dome of the Église Notre-Dame d'Auteuil (built in the 1880s) is an unmistakable small-time cousin of Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. Rue d'Auteuil is at its liveliest on Wednesday and Saturday morning, when a much-loved street market crams onto Place Jean-Lorraine.