The creator Astel describes lives, sleeps and looks for ideas in a single room of twelve square metres and meets colleagues only at events, where there is barely time to say hello. On 1 October the Paris-based Astel opened a city palace in the Marais to creators, free of charge and with no subscriber threshold. The project was founded by YouTuber Sylvqin and Xavier Niel, founder of the Iliad group and the Station F campus.
The palace holds filming studios, workspaces, a screening room and a garden, and the doors are open round the clock. A creator can walk in even at 3.19am on a Sunday, but must register like everyone else.
La Réclame on X recalled that Paris once had similar facilities. In 2015 YouTube opened YouTube Space at Google's Paris headquarters, where creators could use studio equipment for sound, picture and editing free of charge.
The European sites in Paris, Berlin and London closed during the pandemic, and in February 2021 YouTube announced that it would not reopen them. According to Satellifacts, the palace for Astel belongs to Niel, who is financing the project. The kind of space that a platform once gave creators for free would now be paid for by a private investor.
Astel asks for an application and experience to share with members
Creators apply to Astel through an application form. As of 7 October 2026, the official website states neither the length of stay nor the founders' names.
SocialRama quotes Sylvqin as saying that creators do lonely work. According to him, Astel does not look at subscriber numbers, only at creativity. Sylvqin himself has 556,000 subscribers as of 7 October on his channel of stories from the internet.
The application asks for a link to the applicant's existing work, an email address and confirmation that they are over 18. It also asks about content the creator has always wanted to make and has not yet made, and on that question it promises that nobody will steal the idea.
Only after an application is approved does the form ask for a French mobile number verified by an SMS code and an address in France. The website then confirms the creator's membership and promises a mobile app. A creator without a French mobile cannot complete membership through the website.
Creators already represented by an agency may also apply. In return for membership, a creator commits to sharing experience and passing knowledge on to other members. Astel's website distinguishes it from coworking by saying that people there have fun together. According to Entrevue, being free lowers the financial barrier, but selection still decides who gets access to the equipment.
Niel invested in Tipeee back in 2015
In November 2015 Niel and the presenter Laurent Ruquier invested in the French creator-support platform Tipeee. Niel then told Le Figaro that a model for financing creative work on the web had always been sought and that Tipeee gave a concrete answer to it. In September 2023 Sylvqin published an interview with Niel on his channel about the Free project, which existed before Twitch. The project did not succeed.
Adham Hassan, head of Creative Group, writes in a LinkedIn post that creators are becoming important enough for entrepreneurs of Niel's calibre to build entire venues around them. Astel has not yet published a detailed business model. What Niel gets out of a palace for creators who, according to Astel, often live in twelve-square-metre rooms remains open.
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