What is it with rock music and hotels? They make for the unlikeliest of bedfellows. One is about turning the volume way up; the other is obviously—hopefully—about decibel levels so low that you can sleep. And yet, they just can’t seem to get enough of each other, from London’s Portobello Hotel to Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont, via the Chelsea in New York. The latest, the recently opened Bus Palladium in Paris, might be the grooviest and rock starriest of them all, though; it stands on the site of a famous/infamous Parisian rock club which first opened its doors in the 1960s. The hotel is a fabulous, 1970s-inflected, Studio KO-designed, Brutalist-facaded, thirty-five-roomed hangout with a new nightclub deep in its basement, and located in the 9ème, the city’s grooviest neighborhood. (It’s home to everything from the Moulin Rouge to the very first Rose Bakery).

Just to burnish those credentials further, Bus Palladium’s artistic direction has been handled by Caroline de Maigret, the model, author, and music producer, who has lived locally for some twenty years. Joining her are chef Valentin Raffali, formerly of Marseilles’s much lauded Livingston restaurant, and Lionel Bensemoun, the founder and former owner of the Le Baron nightclub. The hotel, meanwhile, is owned by Nicolas Saltiel’s Chapitre Six hotel group, which specializes in establishments in iconic, offbeat locations. The owner of the site Bus Palladium stands on, Christian Casmeze, came to Saltiel with the idea of putting a five-star hotel atop a nightclub, and Saltiel was in, even if on paper it looked pretty impossible. The personal connection Saltiel felt for the place undoubtedly helped; years ago, he’d been a waiter at Bus Palladium. “Nobody wanted to touch it,” he says, laughing. “The project was complicated; the construction was complicated…but when Christian proposed the idea, I said, ‘Let’s go!’ And working with Caroline, Valentin, Lionel…well, it’s like making a movie; a director always wants to work with the best people.”

What adds to Bus Palladium’s cachet is that it stands on hallowed ground: Not just that there was once a Bus Palladium club on the exact same spot, but the street it’s on, Rue Fontaine, you could write a whole history about; Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, and Surrealist André Breton all lived and/or worked there at some point in their lives. The nightclub started life in 1925 as the L’Ange Rouge music hall, before entrepreneur James Arch renamed it in 1965 as Bus Palladium, with its golden years of guitar-soloed hipsterdom stretching well into the 1970s and beyond, drawing people from far and wide to tune in, turn on, and freak out to the latest sounds. Until, that is, the music was finally turned off in 2022, and it was, sometime later, demolished to make way for this new incarnation of Bus Palladium.

The name, incidentally, came about because Arch ran a bus service to pick up those living in the suburbs so that they too could come to the club, dancing alongside the likes of Patti Smith, Serge Gainsbourg, Brian Jones, Jane Birkin, and Salvador Dali, who arrived one night with a leopard on a leash. (The hotel has named a suite in his honour.) That sense of being a little more democratic about who gets through the door—a kind of anti-velvet rope syndrome, if you like—colors the new Bus Palladium too, with the hotel’s social epicentre being the new nightclub. It’s a two-floors-below fantasia of a 1920s dancehall, with balconies, and a massive glitterball suspended from the ceiling. Meanwhile, at street level, there’s the bar and restaurant which will be open to all, and be open, in some form or other, 24/7—in part because the neighbourhood, perched at the border of the former red-light district Pigalle, is both somewhere people live their daily lives, and where people flock to go out at night, a lot. The idea is that of course this is a place for the guests, but also for the broader local community. “It’s a place where people can interact with each other, and it won’t be too shiny,” Saltiel says of Bus Palladium. “It feels like something we don’t really have in Paris.”

For Studio KO’s Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, the social openness was one of the reasons they signed on to design Bus Palladium. They’ve created a hotel where vintage 1960s and 1970s furniture sourced from the likes of Clignancourt’s antique markets is mixed with gleaming, streamlined new pieces. Blush pink carpeting gives warmth, as well as a slyly kitsch wink of humour; meanwhile, the raw, almost industrial, stairwells are painted red to match the backstage areas you’d find at iconic Parisian music venues like L’Olympia. “It was an invitation we couldn’t turn down!” Fournier and Marty tell me via email when asked about why they wanted to take it on. “We were already familiar with the place because [the original club] had left such an impression on us back when we were young students in Paris; we loved its eclecticism, the lack of snobbery, its iconoclastic side, and of course its long history.”

From a design point of view, Fournier and Marty wanted, they say, something which, like the club itself over the years, flirted with fads, but somehow survived them all. So, the Brutalist exterior of the hotel mirrors that of the club of James Arch’s era by virtue of being a cast replica of what stood there before, while the Brutalism inside, utilising exposed planes of concrete, is softened with organic materials like wool, cork, and velvet. There’s also a nod to the Space Age-isms of the Sixties, with the Studio KO guys saying, “when the conquest of space and its imagination inspired creativity in fashion, design, and architecture; a nod to that enchanted era when technology was still seen as the harbinger of a brighter, better future—since then, we’ve become disillusioned!”

For Caroline de Maigret, a self-professed “Pigalle chick,” and a one-time habitué of the original Bus Palladium, the club was a first: “The DJ played rock music; I know that sounds very obvious for American or British people,” she says, “but much less for the French.” Saltiel hired de Maigret for her connection to the place—in the 2000s she’d book the bands she was working with to play live there—as well of course as her aesthetic and aural input. You can listen to her playlists (Rosalía to Miles Davis, Prince to Fleetwood Mac) through the rooms OJAS speakers—or tune via a live feed to whatever music is being played downstairs in the club. De Maigret conceived the playlists as being a little sexier (say no more), to get you in the mood to go out, to be a bit jazzier, or to be in French only. “I thought that would be fun for French people,” she says, “but also guests from elsewhere, who can hear the last fifty years of French music.”

Where de Maigret’s touch comes into play is in not only what you see but what you experience, that indefinable quality of a hotel where style meets soul: her decision, for instance, that the staff should wear the most perfect Gainsbourg-ian brown corduroy suits from Husbands Paris, because that late ’60s to early ’70s era was one of rock’s most majestically stylish eras. Or that what you really want to eat when you get in late at night (or early morning) isn’t so different from what you’d raid the open-all-night deli post-clubbing—namely tortilla chips, salsa, and Haribo candy. And should you need any more incentive to stay, just know that de Maigret’s playlist runs to some 3,000 music tracks. You’ll check in, and chances are, you’ll never want to leave.