Arriving at Bus Palladium at the end of a sunny spring afternoon, I was thrilled to see a familiar vertical, two-word neon sign glowing orange again in a side street in Pigalle. An old friend I ran into on the way summed up the general disbelief: “A luxury hotel? The Bus was such a skanky fuck pit.” He wasn’t entirely wrong. For more than half a century, Bus Palladium was Paris’s best-known rock ’n’ roll nightclub. Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song about it, “Qui Est ‘In,’ Qui Est ‘Out,’” which he later performed there. Salvador Dalí arrived with a panther, Mick Jagger celebrated his birthday, and the Beatles played a set on its stage.
After a depressing four-year hiatus, Bus Palladium has been transformed into a 35-room luxury hotel with a bar, restaurant, and club by building owner Christian Casmèze and hotelier Nicolas Saltiel, with architecture and interiors by the design firm Studio KO. The challenge wasn’t simply converting a nightclub into a hotel—it was preserving the spirit of a place that had spent decades at the center of Paris nightlife.