Los Angeles

Los Angeles arrived as a great city with unusual speed, and its hotels arrived alongside it. Where other American cities built their grand hotels over generations, Los Angeles constructed its mythology in a matter of decades — the rush of the movie industry, the influx of wealthy migrants, and the explosion of tourism created both the demand and the resources for properties of genuine grandeur.

The Beverly Hills Hotel stands at the center of this story. Built in 1912, five years before Beverly Hills was incorporated as a city, it became the social and physical anchor of what would become the most glamorous zip code in America. The Pink Palace, as it came to be called, absorbed the mythology of Hollywood even as Hollywood was being invented around it — a place where studio deals were made in the Polo Lounge and stars hid from the world in its discreet garden bungalows.

Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard occupies a different register of Los Angeles hotel mythology. Built in 1929 to resemble a Norman castle, it became the preferred residence of actors, directors, and musicians who valued privacy above all else. Jim Morrison climbed in through a window. Led Zeppelin rode motorcycles through the lobby. John Belushi died in Bungalow 3. The hotel has accommodated Hollywood’s most consequential secrets for nearly a century.

The Biltmore downtown, opened in 1923 with interiors by the same firm that designed Rome’s Villa Medici, was for decades the social center of Los Angeles civic life — hosting Academy Award ceremonies in the Gallery Bar and receiving every president from Herbert Hoover onward.

Los Angeles hotels reflect the city’s particular genius for reinvention while maintaining fidelity to their essential myths. In a city that is always becoming, the historic hotels are a rare fixed point — places where the past and present coexist in productive tension.