A Long-Closed Paris Tunnel Is Now a Public Toilet
A tunnel that was shut to the public for years, and used as a storage room for the city's cleaning crews, is now a public restroom. It sits beneath the Trocadero Gardens, the hillside park across the river from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The conversion was designed by the Paris architecture firm Chartier-Corbasson Architectes, as Dezeen reported on 11 November 2026.
The tunnel is older than most of the park around it. It was built for the 1937 Universal Exposition, the world's fair held in Paris that year, and was designed by Roger Lardat. For decades it was a space few visitors ever saw.
The architects kept much of the original character. The tunnel is framed by openings in bush-hammered concrete, a rough, textured finish made by chipping the surface with a tool. Its walls are lined with flint, a hard grey stone. Some of that flint is etched with graffiti left by US soldiers at the end of the Second World War.
The new fittings are made from stainless steel and weathered steel. Weathered steel is a type of steel that develops a rust-coloured surface layer, which protects the metal underneath and, over time, changes its colour.
The project is part of the OnE masterplan, a long-term plan to improve public spaces and gardens around the Eiffel Tower. That plan was awarded in 2019 to Chartier-Corbasson Architectes and Gustafson Porter + Bowman, a London landscape design firm.
The renovation has also been shortlisted in the Heritage project category of the Dezeen Awards 2026. A shortlist is a list of finalists, and the winners have not yet been named.
For visitors to the Trocadero, the change is simple. A space that once held cleaning equipment now serves the public. For the city, it is a small piece of a larger plan to reshape the ground around one of Paris's best-known landmarks.
