Hotel Clermont

Hotel Clermont reopened in Poncey-Highland in late 2017, ninety-four rooms inside a 1924 apartment building that spent its last chapter as a shuttered flophouse above Atlanta's oldest strip club. Oliver Hospitality's restoration, with Gamble + Gamble Architects, kept the marquee, the terrazzo and the Clermont Lounge downstairs — proof that a building's rough decades can be an asset rather than a liability to erase.

The place

The hotel occupies 789 Ponce de Leon Avenue NE, on the stretch of historic Ponce that separates Poncey-Highland from Midtown and Virginia-Highland. The address has anchored this corridor since the 1920s, back when Ponce de Leon Avenue was Atlanta's main east-west artery, and the hotel's restoration leans hard into that continuity — the vintage marquee sign out front, long a neighborhood landmark, was kept rather than replaced.

The concept

The eight-story building opened in June 1924 as the Bonaventure Arms, an apartment house of roughly 85 units. It became the Clermont Motor Hotel in 1939, then slid through decades as a roadside hotel, an upscale supper club, and eventually a residential flophouse, before Fulton County health authorities shut it down in December 2009. It sat derelict until Oliver Hospitality bought the building in 2013 for $2.3 million and spent roughly four years and over $20 million restoring it with Gamble + Gamble Architects, salvaging original terrazzo, doors and structural bones rather than gutting them. The hotel opened in phases: guest rooms began welcoming visitors in late 2017, with the restaurant and rooftop bar completed by mid-2018. The result trades polish for character — a boutique property built around the building's rough history rather than in spite of it, aimed at design-minded travelers and Atlanta locals treating it as a staycation rather than an airport-hotel crowd.

Dining & wellness

Tiny Lou's, a French-American brasserie, anchors the ground floor alongside a lobby bar and library. Upstairs, The Rooftop runs an Astroturf-covered deck with a tented, heated bar shack serving frosé, tiki cocktails and street food, open nightly with skyline views over Poncey-Highland. The Clermont Lounge — the strip club that has occupied the basement since 1965 and is a genuine Atlanta institution — is not part of the hotel: it kept its own independent ownership through the renovation and operates as a separate business one floor down.