{"id":58185,"date":"2026-07-28T19:23:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/58185\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T19:23:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:23:13","slug":"the-historic-parisian-rock-club-thats-now-an-it-hotel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/58185\/","title":{"rendered":"The Historic Parisian Rock Club That’s Now an “It” Hotel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated4 min read<\/p>\n

Every Paris Fashion Week, the fashion industry seems to wordlessly coalesce around a handful of bistros and bars, hotels, and shops. Sometimes these anointed spots are decades-old mainstays, sometimes they\u2019re new upstarts, but they all share a rarefied buzz. These are the places to be, to see and be seen.<\/p>\n

This summer, in advance of the men\u2019s and couture shows, I started to hear about a new place that was an old place that was also a hotel and a restaurant and a bar and a club. The Bus Palladium<\/a>, which opened this past spring, is the new incarnation of the famed Pigalle rock club, which opened in 1965 and played host to regulars like Salvador Dal\u00ed, Mick Jagger, and Serge Gainsbourg. (Gainsbourg wrote \u201cQui est \u2018in\u2019, qui est \u2018out\u2019\u201d about the Bus Palladium.)<\/p>\n

\"FourCourtesy of James Arch<\/p>\n

The Bus Palladium in the 1960s, photo courtesy of the club\u2019s founder James Arch<\/p>\n

While the club officially closed in 2022, the idea for Bus Palladium\u2019s new life was born over a backgammon game between the building\u2019s owner, Christian Casm\u00e8ze, and Nicolas Saltiel, founder of the Chapitre Six hotel group. Casm\u00e8ze had a vision of the club as a relative of New York\u2019s Chelsea Hotel. The DNA and history were there; all they needed to do was build it.<\/p>\n

\"Neon<\/p>\n

Matthieu Salvaing for Bus Palladium<\/p>\n

An all-star team of Parisian tastemakers was tapped to bring the project to life. Studio KO, the architecture firm led by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, known for projects like London\u2019s Chiltern Firehouse, the renovation of L.A.\u2019s Chateau Marmont, and the Yves Saint Laurent museum in Marrakech, oversaw the build. Eternal French cool girl Caroline de Maigret came in as creative director, overseeing the scent, uniforms, and in-room playlists. And nightlife impresario Lionel Bensemoun, co-founder of Le Baron, took on the heady task of reviving the club and programming it.<\/p>\n

I checked into the Bus Palladium during a reporting trip on a fortuitous early summer week in Paris, mere days before the first heat waves hit. (Though it must be said, the AC was working beautifully.)<\/p>\n

\"Neon<\/p>\n

Matthieu Salvaing<\/p>\n

The original Bus Palladium was just two floors, an aberrant silhouette on Rue Pierre Fontaine\u2019s row of Haussmannian buildings. To convert the club into a proper hotel, Studio KO had to demolish the existing structure, which wouldn\u2019t have been able to sustain the six additional floors added to the building. They kept the iconic vertical red neon BUS PALLADIUM sign, my only clue I was in the right spot when I arrived at 6 Rue Pierre Fontaine. Studio KO maintained much of the essence of the club\u2014there\u2019s nothing about entering the space that screams hotel lobby. I clocked a wall of carefully curated records by the hotel\u2019s bar and restaurant before I figured out where the subtle dark wood-paneled front desk was.<\/p>\n

\"A\u00a9 MATTHIEU SALVAING<\/p>\n

The wall of records.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis new architecture had to retain an imprint of the original building, so that residents of the neighborhood who had known the Bus Palladium would feel that it had not really changed, and that it was waking up a bit like a sleeping beauty,\u201d says Karl Fournier, co-founder of Studio KO. \u201cSo we made sure that the layers of past and present would add up and accumulate, rather than erase one another. We also had to recover the building\u2019s lines: we reused the vocabulary of its architecture by keeping, for example, the two entrance doors. Every detail was studied \u2026 We created a dividing line at the height where the original Bus Palladium building ended and, above that, we built the six floors.\u201d<\/p>\n

I must admit I was apprehensive about the noise; the club is still a cornerstone of the Bus Palladium, open Thursday through Friday, with hotel guests even receiving priority access. During fashion week it attracted the likes of Madonna and Charlie XCX. But I needed to work and to get up early for interviews. Fortunately, my room was as silent as a tomb (complimentary!).<\/p>\n

\"Stylish<\/p>\n

Matthieu Salvaing<\/p>\n

The walls are lined with cork, and other surfaces, including the ceilings, are concrete\u2014materials Studio KO used to create striking visual contrast between, say, the powdery rouge carpeting and the Yves Klein blue zellige tiles lining the bathroom, but which also did a great job of blocking out any sounds.<\/p>\n

\"Modern<\/p>\n

Matthieu Salvaing for Bus Palladium<\/p>\n

The overall effect was sleek yet warm and welcoming. Crucially, the bed was incredibly comfortable. Other design touches included a built-in banquette and table (a perfect spot to work) and a stereo system that piped in playlists curated by de Maigret (you could choose between four).<\/p>\n

De Maigret currently lives in Pigalle and started going to Bus Palladium when she was 18. \u201cIt was one of my favorite places in Paris, and it still is today,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause you can breathe in a creative verve there, something both joyful and sultry.\u201d She also highlights another key draw of the Bus Palladium: its location.<\/p>\n

\u201cI moved there more than twenty years ago. It is still a village-like neighborhood, with diversity, craftspeople, and people who share real expertise,\u201d says de Maigret. \u201cPigalle truly was one of the epicenters of art in Paris, and you can still feel it today when walking around. Auguste Renoir\u2019s studio, which later became Suzanne Valadon\u2019s and can be visited at the Mus\u00e9e Montmartre. Le Bal, a photography gallery and new media space, with programming that is always interesting and committed. Concert venues like La Cigale, La Boule Noire, or Le Trianon \u2026 there is so much to see.\u201d Conveniently, de Maigret put a list of her favorite spots in each room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4 min read Every Paris Fashion Week, the fashion industry seems to wordlessly coalesce around a handful of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[97,36514,99,8655,98,30,2966,36513,30755,8654],"class_list":["post-58185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-paris","tag-content-type-default","tag-contentid-82805113-2169-45b3-a1e3-3d8829aa38e7","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-paris","tag-read_time-4","tag-shorttitle-this-old-rock-club-is-pariss-newest-it-hotel","tag-sponsored-false","tag-subsection-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}