Some time after the last of the Saturday-night dinner plates have been cleared away, the Opus Hotel Montreal’s Koko Restaurant + Bar erupts. The sonic grooves of live DJs pump through the bar as fashionably clad revelers amass to dance the night away on the ground floor of this distinctive hotel's original 1914 structure, one of the first poured-concrete buildings in North America. An adjoining modern addition completes a dichotomous framework that parallels the hotel's dual lives: throughout the week, a stylized retreat for businesspeople and sightseers; on the weekend, an entertainment hub where jetsetters alight to commingle at one of Montreal’s most adrenalized nightlife destinations.

Above the Opus's spacious, minimalist lobby, deluxe rooms and junior suites greet travelers with walls awash in electric grapefruit, plum, honeydew, or orange hues, accentuated by a king bed's sable-toned frame. A 27-inch LCD television with an integrated, Internet-connected computer perches above a broad writing desk, complemented in junior suites by a separate sitting area with a full-size sofa. In the bathroom, a glass-walled walk-in shower competes for bathers’ attention with a separate soaking tub, deep enough to comfortably subsume an adult male or fully grown mannequin.

Downstairs, the chandeliered interior of Koko Restaurant + Bar casts refracted golden light onto smoked-prosciutto sushi rolls and parmesan-and-dijon-crusted rack of lamb prior to its nightclub metamorphosis. In the morning, an in-room breakfast might include the oven-born bounty of nearby St-Viateur Bagel, a tasty foundation to a day of urban exploration.

The siren song of European fashion and the smell of freshly baked bread coax hotel guests to the Boulevard Saint-Laurent, known as The Main, on which the Opus Hotel Montreal sits. Just northwest, the Plateau neighborhood's fanciful gallery, café, and boutique façades neighbor private residences, many of which sport Montreal’s characteristic snaked staircases and ornate cornices.

Old Montreal, a 20-minute hike from the hotel door, merits its reputation as a displaced slice of Europe. Bricked avenues twist and turn like perjuring witnesses, and a designated pedestrian zone recalls the city as it once was: cramped, bustling, and brilliant. Around a bend awaits the Rue des Artistes, a narrow strait populated by painters hawking their wares, the unfurled smoke of their pipes forming an ephemeral cloud ceiling.

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