The reawakening began over a game of backgammon in 2019, when Casmèze, whose grandfather bought the building in 1924, met Nicolas Saltiel of Chapitre Six and floated a hotel that would do for Paris what the Chelsea Hotel once did for New York. The brief went to Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO, the duo behind the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech and the renovation of the Château Marmont. The original 1897 two-storey structure could not carry the weight of new floors, so it came down, replaced by an eight-storey building with four additional floors below ground. Cast in situ, its sandblasted concrete façade echoes the sandy tones of Haussmann stone, engraved with discreet geometric lines that trace the brickwork of the building that stood before.

Inside, the building’s brutalist rigour is purposefully juxtaposed with a warm, retro-inspired interior design language. “For us, contrast is not just a visual effect, but a way of making space feel more alive,” Fournier explains. Raw concrete ceilings meet a soft Ottoman-pattern carpet that runs everywhere, even climbing the walls as wallpaper, a device borrowed from Rudolf Stingel's takeover of the Palazzo Grassi. A deep lacquered red, the colour of the old neon sign, threads through corridors and details as a leitmotif of the past. The musical metaphor is everywhere, from switches that recall vintage amplifiers to microperforated door handles patterned after microphone grilles.

The headline act is the 70-square-metre Suite Dalí, the hotel's largest, which plays the seventies card at full volume. The space is anchored by a salvaged cognac-leather De Sede DS-600 modular sofa, paired with a black-leather Apollo lounge chair by Illum Wikkelsø and a brass-topped Galaxy coffee table by Henge, a few of the midcentury icons scattered throughout. A mirrored wall punctuated by a leopard-print bed alcove and a glass-encased black marble bathroom that floats in one corner like a spaceship complete the retro-futurist, Kubrick-esque aesthetic. A private balcony that looks onto rue Fontaine and the red neon sign gives the suite what Fournier calls the feeling of being "in that famous foreground photograph of Patti Smith on the balcony of the Chelsea Hotel."

The ground-floor restaurant, by chef Valentin Raffali, seats 70 around diner-style banquettes that curl toward a glazed cube enclosing a small patch of jungle, an indoor garden of towering ferns. Trained alongside Michelin-starred chefs and Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, Raffali keeps the menu tight and ingredient-led: smoked white asparagus, barbecued red mullet with tartare sauce, saddle of Lozère lamb. An entire wall of vinyl, including James Arch's own historic Bus Palladium collection bought back for the project, sets the tempo, with a console that pulls out for a DJ.

In the basement, the revived club is Bus Palladium's beating heart. Studio KO has kept faith with the original layout while adding a hint of theatrics: Persian-style carpeting climbing the walls, silver lamé curtains, a smoking room clad in stainless steel and a mammoth disco ball hanging over it all. That sense of theatre carries into the programming, which spans concert venue and dance club. Overseen by artistic director Lionel Bensemoun, former force behind Le Baron and Petit Palace, the schedule moves between DJ sets, cabaret shows and live music performances, making room for visual artists, video artists and contemporary dance companies.

No endorsement of the new Bus Palladium carries more weight than that of James Arch, now 83, who, visiting the club six decades after he opened it, found that the new incarnation gave him goosebumps. "Same vibrations," was his verdict. What he built on instinct in 1965, a free place where the worlds that never meet could finally meet, to a dance step, has been rewritten rather than restored.