You'll Always Have Paris

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PARIS does funny things to people. Imagine, for example, crawling off an airplane, making your way across the city with a bad case of jet lag and waking up the next day to find that you are the new owner of some stranger's apartment in the 17th Arrondissement.

That would be where, exactly? And how much did it cost again?

"It happened so fast," said Deviyani Nautiyal, sounding surprised even several months later as she recounted a hunt that began at home, in front of a computer. "I can't believe we bought an apartment within four hours of landing."

She was on the phone in Rochester, Minn., where she and her husband, Sanjeev Sethi, a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic, normally live, an inconvenient 12 hours and two subway rides from their new second home.

It's hard to get figures on how many Americans leave Paris with a souvenir in the form of a French mortgage. But the number is "mushrooming," according to Cecil Jones, president of Just France Sales, a property finders' service for those who speak English. (Incidentally, the number of agencies like his is mushrooming, too.)

Lured by such services, low interest rates and hopes that investing in French real estate is a smart way to diversify - if the euro continues to strengthen - Americans are scouring parts of Paris they barely knew five years ago. Consider the 17th, where Ms. Nautiyal, a lawyer, and Dr. Sethi found their 635-square-foot, one-bedroom, 375,000-euro (about $480,000) pied-�-terre in January. Indeed, you might consider it now, before the next wave of buyers spills over from the heavily touristed Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Arrondissements.

The 17th may have its funky stretches and seem a bit removed on the far Right Bank, but that's one reason it still has deals, making it the latest destination for Americans who long for a well-priced piece of Paris.

Not long ago some of the same people might have focused on Left Bank addresses like the Rue Cler, a lively market street in the Seventh Arrondissement not far from the Eiffel Tower. Today there are so many Americans shopping on Rue Cler for their bread and French butter - and their second homes - that half the voices you hear have a familiar accent.

Ms. Nautiyal says that she sees the 17th as an antidote to "Leftitis," and financially, anyway, she is right: according to Paris Real Estate Finders, a search-and-buy service, which helped steer her and her husband across the Seine, the average asking price per square foot in the Rue Cler neighborhood topped $1,050 in May, in contrast to an average asking price in the 17th of $773. And the highly diverse 17th, at least for the moment, has far fewer people from back home.

It also has patches that are not so wonderful - the Avenue de Clichy comes to mind - and some that are elegant indeed. C. Randolph Fishburn, a lawyer in New York who frequently works in Paris, paid 1.1 million euros last year for a central-casting two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment on the stately Avenue de Wagram: 1,400 renovated square feet in a 19th-century building "across from the only 24-hour flower shop in Paris," he said. He added that the florist also stocks Champagne - presumably in case of emergencies. Mr. Fishburn said he "realized the market is undervalued and I could do this as investment and a euro hedge."

Closing costs were high but carrying costs - property taxes and maintenance fees - are not, and his mortgage rate is below 4 percent. That's lower than this season's high heels.

The 17th sits on the Right Bank like a big crooked wedge of pizza, its nose under the Arc de Triomphe and its crust overlapping the beltway that rims the western edge of the city. In the late 19th century, when Paris was expanding like a souffl�, the far-flung 17th was a getaway for the world-weary. Zola retreated there to write (and gave his heroine Nana, an actress turned rich-man's mistress, a 17th Arrondissement address). Impressionists lived and worked there too, recording the train stations rising to the east, their tracks strewn in fistfuls in the 17th. As developers piled in, large apartments rose up to accommodate bourgeois families and well-kept Nanas.

Today the arrondissement is a patchwork of neighborhoods plain, fancy and iffy. Grand avenues like Wagram emanate from the Place d'�toile like spokes in a wheel, and just below the 17th's southern border, in the fashionable Eighth, sits the seductive Parc Monceau. At the eastern edge is the mildly gamy Place de Clichy, to the north the villagelike area called Batignolles. Hidden throughout are quiet streets, green spaces and bargains.