Street Art Tour with Kids in Paris’s Les Marais Neigborhood

For our first trip to Paris with our toddlers, we booked a 3-hour street art tour in the Les Marais neighborhood via Isabelle Southgates. Since we’ve never done an organized private tour before, we didn’t know what to expect.

From Isabelle’s website, I thought the tour she’s offering is a good fit for us: Brenn and I will get to know the Les Marais neighborhood with a guide, and the kids will be entertained and engaged exploring the streets of Les Marais.

The tour was set up like a scavenger hunt. Isabelle provided us with a map of the neighborhood, guided us, and gave clues of where the next street art is. After a couple of tries, our kids got totally into it. Their favorite was finding space invaders! These are art made of ceramic tiles inspired by the ’80’s video game of the same name by the artist who goes after the monicker, Invader. Along the way, Isabelle would also point out interesting tidbits about the neighborhood.

We spy a silly octopus with underwear on its head (by GZ’up).

Here’s a sampling of what we found:

Chuuuttt! Listen! by Jef Aerosol at the Stravinsky Fountain
This one’s my favorite.

Towards the end of our journey, we took a break for some hot chocolate at the Le Voltiguer cafe. They serve DIY-style hot chocolate here: pour milk into your cup, add as much or as little hot chocolate that you want, stir and enjoy. Brycie and Bree really liked it.

  • Do it yourself hot chocolate
  • Brycie loved the hot chocolate
  • Lemon Meringue Pie

Isabelle also had some paper and square stickers so the kids can make their own space invaders art work.

We were glad we did this tour with Isabelle. We did this during the first part of our London-Paris-Strasbourg-Paris trip, and when we came back to Paris from Strasbourg, we did another round of space invader hunt.

For our Paris Itinerary, check out A Parisian Open Letter.