One of Paris’s most storied clubs has found a second act as a hotel—without giving up its after-hours soul.

In 1965, Serge Gainsbourg recorded the song “Qui est in? Qui est out?” in a studio in London, looking back across the Channel at the soigné crowd swanning about in the dirty, sexy, neon-lit world of Pigalle in his native Paris. The track’s title translates to “Who is in? Who is out?” and ostensibly attempts to pinpoint the capricious nature of cool, a term so slippery and changeable in France as to have never really had an equivalent in the lingua franca. But really the song is about the comings and goings, the ins and outs, the highs (lots of those) and lows of the crowd at the Bus Palladium—the famous nightclub and music venue that languished forever beneath the Rue Fontaine.
“You love nitroglycerin / That’s what you listen to at the Bus Palladium / There’s a crowd on Rue Fontaine / For the little guys from Liverpool.”
Those little guys from Liverpool were the sweet and adorable and utterly inconsequential band the Beatles, of course, while nitroglycerin evokes the explosive energy of the music and the era itself. Gainsbourg’s lyric is less a literal reference than a wink at the volatile excitement of the mid-1960s Parisian rock scene, with the Bus Palladium serving as its epicenter. Aptly, the club took its name from the Bus Palladium, the famously raucous shuttle that once carried partygoers of every stripe and persuasion from the rugged banlieues into the heart of the 9th arrondissement. Who is in? Who is out? For a significant portion of the ’60s and ’70s, only the imperious doormen at the Bus Palladium could really decide.

The nightclub reigned in a blaze and haze of late nights, loud music, and celebrities on-and-off for more than six decades. Salvador Dalí used to attend with a panther on a chain; Mick Jagger celebrated several of his birthdays there. It had originally been set up in 1963 by a dancer named James Arch as a place of avant-garde, hard-partying, poetic vagrants, with a strong musical core—CBGBs-meets–Studio 54 with a smattering of Gallic nudity. It was always apparently immune to the changing fortunes of the now–semi-gentrified Pigalle around it. The area—which the demob-happy American GIs used to refer to gleefully as Pig Alley—had long housed sex shops, the famous Moulin Rouge, and eclectic cafes, brooding with true locals and those who didn’t yet wish to go to bed. Now, such flavors mingle with fashionable bakeries, bourgeois-boheme spots, organic markets, and the general intrusions of the 21st century, of which Bus Palladium always appeared happily unaware. But then, in 2022, the venue closed permanently—struck down, like so many other nightclubs of its vintage, by the strictures of the pandemic. Four years later it has cheerfully reopened—but with a beautiful, chic, singular hotel looming high above it. This strange and glamorous transmogrification is a telling echo of the changing hospitality and cultural mores of every big city, perhaps—an economic climate that is so slim and slippery that everything must also be something else, and in which nostalgia is a rich and deep buffet.

The resulting hotel is somehow both elegant and brutalist. The location’s playful, referential design was masterminded by local architects Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO, who used a photo of Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in 1971 as their initial spark. The result is devilishly eclectic, with a distinct mid-century, space-age aesthetic characterized by burl woods, animal prints, circular rugs, flashes of burnt orange, and low-slung leather sofas the color of worn baseball mitts. There are wood-clad speakers hovering in every corner, and the rest of the furnishings—like the cork walls, a material the architects carried over from their previous design of Francis Ford Coppola’s New York apartment—seem well set up to naturally soundproof the thump and chatter of the many impromptu parties that will surely soon break out in these suites, as if the ghosts of the space far below have slithered louchely upstairs, awakened by the pop of a distant cork. Such parties will no doubt be soundtracked by the bespoke playlists curated by the hotel’s artistic director and spirit animal, former model and Chanel ambassador Caroline de Maigret, who also infused the space with its signature woody scent. The charming, cajoling staff here wear clothes designed by de Maigret in partnership with the ’70s-inflected French label Husbands Paris—all boot heels, subtle flares, and lapels as wide as the Channel itself. Young chef Valentin Raffali (is there a more delicious name in all of cooking?) has put together a menu the place describes as “straightforward, precise”—which in practice means sultry roasted monkfish in a lobster bisque, a nutty-rich aged entrecôte, and a spaghetti glimmering with sunlight-colored bottarga.

The dining room itself, spilling over with fragrant ferns, centers on a vinyl bar, and indeed, on certain evenings since its reopening in the spring, the whole place has seemed to spin and crackle with the warmth and serendipity of another age. And at the heart of it all lies the club of yesteryear and today—this sort of constantly felt presence, ticking and humming, like the ominous old boiler room beneath The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, but without, you know, all the murder and weird children. Instead, it is strictly good times once one steps through the brushed steel door of the club’s entrance on the lower ground floor. Lionel Bensemoun, who used to oversee Le Baron and La Mano, is the head of programming for the space, which flexes between cabaret acts, live music, DJ sets, film screenings, cocktail hours, and jazz. It is inviting and conspiratorial. An immense disco ball sends little jewels of light spinning across the Persian rugs and industrialist brickwork, while a glowing central bar attracts elegant barflies like moths. Bensemoun’s ethos is said to be decisively inclusive—a neat homage to the spirit of the venue’s past, and the eponymous shuttle that used to take the kids from the suburbs into the melee. Thankfully, many other modes of transport are now available towards this singular, handsome, beguiling spot, whose red neon sign glows once again like a homing beacon. Hotel Bus Palladium—get there by Uber, by bike, by private jet, or by time machine.

Hotel Bus Palladium Is Keeping Parisian History Alive and Well

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