Atlanta, Georgia · Four-Star Boutique · ★★★★
Hotel Clermont
A 1924 Ponce de Leon motor lodge made cool again — the city's best rooftop and a dive bar legend below.
A 1924 Ponce de Leon motor lodge made cool again — the city's best rooftop and a dive bar legend below.
"A 1924 motor lodge on Ponce reborn as Atlanta's coolest boutique. The rooftop is the city's best, the Clermont Lounge below is still there — older, ruder, intact — and Tiny Lou's serves the most quietly confident French food in the city."
Hotel Clermont opened in 1924 as the Bass Hotel — a six-storey brick-and-terracotta building on Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta's main east-west artery, built to serve travellers arriving at the original Sears Roebuck warehouse across the street (now Ponce City Market). For most of the late 20th century, the upper floors slid into a single-room-occupancy half-life while the basement became home to the Clermont Lounge — Atlanta's oldest continuously operating strip club, founded 1965, beloved equally by Anthony Bourdain, R.E.M., and three generations of Georgia Tech freshmen. The building's biography is the point of the building.
In 2018 the Oliver Hospitality group reopened the upper floors as Hotel Clermont — a 94-room boutique that treats the building's history as a feature, not an embarrassment. The Clermont Lounge remained downstairs, untouched and unbothered, accessed through its own separate entrance on Ponce. Above it, the hotel's restoration is precise rather than nostalgic: terrazzo floors, brass detailing, vintage Atlanta photography, and rooms that lean confidently into mid-century Southern eclectic without slipping into pastiche. The result is a hotel that is unmistakably of Atlanta — neither Buckhead-corporate nor Beltline-twee.
Tiny Lou's, the ground-floor French-American restaurant by chef Jeb Aldrich, is the hotel's defining amenity. Named after a Clermont Lounge legend, the room is dim, banquette-heavy, and serves the kind of brasserie cooking — steak frites, escargots, a properly executed tarte tatin — that Atlanta has been short on for two decades. The Rooftop, six floors up, is the bar that locals from Inman Park and Old Fourth Ward actually come to: cocktails handled with care, a small bites menu from the Tiny Lou's kitchen, and a view across Ponce that takes in Ponce City Market, Midtown, and the Atlanta skyline at dusk. Reserve The Rooftop for sunset on arrival night.
The 94 rooms range from Petite Kings — compact, well-edited, around 200 square feet — to Clermont Suites with separate sitting areas and the original 1924 windows facing Ponce. The eclectic design is consistent: brass headboards, custom wallpaper, framed Atlanta ephemera, vintage rotary telephones that work, and bathrooms with subway tile and matte black fixtures. Rooms facing Ponce are louder but more interesting; rear-facing rooms are quieter and look across to the Old Fourth Ward. Internally, the property is deliberately small — no business centre, no spa, no fitness centre beyond a credible peloton-style room. This is by design.
Location is the other reason to choose the Clermont. Ponce City Market — Atlanta's most successful adaptive reuse, the converted Sears warehouse that now houses Ponce's best food hall and rooftop — is a four-minute walk west. The Atlanta BeltLine Eastside Trail, the abandoned-rail-corridor-turned-linear-park that connects Old Fourth Ward to Piedmont Park, runs directly behind Ponce City Market and is the single best way to see Atlanta on foot or bicycle. Inman Park's bars, Krog Street Market, and the Eastside's restaurant strip are all reachable on the BeltLine without a car. For a four-night stay in Atlanta, no other hotel puts more of the city's actual life within walking distance.
Atlanta runs the Southeast's bachelorette economy and the Clermont is the considered choice — not the predictable Buckhead pick. The mathematics: rooftop on arrival night for cocktails, Tiny Lou's for the dinner that earns Instagram restraint, then descend the building to the Clermont Lounge for the most intentionally absurd nightcap any bachelorette party has ever had. The hotel is small enough to feel taken over by a group of eight without feeling shabby. Reserve adjoining suites and a Rooftop table 96 hours ahead — this is the most-booked rooftop in the city.
For Atlanta couples marking an anniversary the Clermont is the alternative to Buckhead's predictable five-stars — a city-block staycation that begins with a BeltLine walk to dinner at Tiny Lou's and ends with a Rooftop nightcap looking over the skyline you live under. Request a Clermont Suite facing Ponce, book the Tiny Lou's tasting menu, and let the hotel arrange a morning Ponce City Market food-hall breakfast crawl. For couples celebrating a long marriage in the city they built it in, the Clermont is the address that feels personal rather than transactional.
The Clermont is one of the few Atlanta hotels that works for a solo traveller without the awkwardness of being the only person at the bar. The Rooftop has a long counter where a solo guest with a book reads as a regular, not a curiosity. Tiny Lou's accommodates single diners at the bar with a confidence Atlanta restaurants do not always manage. The BeltLine and Ponce City Market are at your door for the daylight hours. For a writer, a consultant on an extended trip, or a solo traveller passing through the South, this is the one Atlanta address that feels designed for one.
Rates checked May 2026. Price may vary by date.
Hotel Clermont's rooftop, Tiny Lou's, and the Clermont Lounge below — three venues, one elevator, the best night out the city offers. Start with the right hotel, then let Ponce do the rest.
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