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.”
