Rooms with a pulse: Bus Palladium, Paris’s historic night club-turned-boutique stay

Proposals for new work are constantly landing on the desk of architecture duo Studio KO. Not all of them lead to commissions but when they were approached to turn Bus Palladium – a storied concert hall in Pigalle – into a six-storey hotel, they jumped at the chance. “A construction project in Paris is something that you can’t turn down,” says Studio KO co-founder Karl Fournier, as he gives Monocle a sneak peek before the opening in April. “We have only done interiors, not architecture, in the city so far, because there are so few gaps left to fill.”

This rare opportunity in the dense French capital also gave Fournier and his partner Olivier Marty a chance to save a Parisian icon. “We like working on institutions: places with a strong sense of place,” says Fournier, citing Marrakech’s Musée Yves Saint Laurent and London’s Chiltern Firehouse, which helped to establish the firm’s reputation. Le Bus, as the venue has been known by Parisians since its 1960s heyday, would be unthinkable without music, so it was clear from the outset that the stage had to remain. The original layout was kept and moved underground, making room for a ground-floor restaurant and 35 guest rooms upstairs. Acoustic isolation was crucial but rather than treating it as a way to separate spaces, the duo made music an integral theme: in the bedrooms, where OJAS sound systems let guests tune in to live performances in the club below; in the restaurant’s big record library; and on the concrete façade, which features Le Bus’s beloved vertical neon sign.

The project stays true to the spirit not only of the former concert hall but also of the area. “We’re not somewhere chic where the codes of palace hotels would have fitted,” says Marty. “Pigalle is Paris’s nightlife district so we wanted to create a joyful place that doesn’t take itself too seriously.” This is reflected in the eclectic carpets: chewing-gum pink in the bedrooms and with kaleidoscopic motifs in the common areas, in homage to Salvador Dalí, who once reportedly frequented Le Bus with a panther on a leash. The space age was also an inspiration, hence neon light tubes, mustard-yellow curtains and other retro-futuristic touches. Special mention goes to the brown corduroy staff uniforms by Husbands Paris.

Writer Annick Weber