Boutique Hotels in California

Our California collection sits in four of these geographies — the desert, the Santa Barbara coast, the Venice Beach edge of Los Angeles, and the Napa wine country.

The Coachella Valley — Palm Springs, Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage — is the desert oasis the Hollywood studios decamped to in the 1930s and where they built mid-century weekend houses across the 1950s and 60s. The architectural inheritance is extraordinary: William F. Cody, Albert Frey, Donald Wexler, Richard Neutra, Herbert Burns. L'Horizon is the Cody-designed 1952 property originally built by a Hollywood executive for his friends — Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra both stayed, and Steve Hermann's 2014 renovation restored the desert-modernism to Sinatra-era specification. Twenty-five rooms set among palm trees and flowering cacti, the San Jacinto mountains rising directly behind, and SO•PA serving outdoor dinners under a leaf canopy cooled by misters in the desert evening.

Santa Barbara and Montecito, two hours up the coast from Los Angeles, sit in the unusual east-facing pocket of the California shoreline where the Channel Islands shelter the bay and the climate runs Mediterranean rather than Pacific. The architecture is Spanish Colonial Revival, the agriculture is lemon and avocado, and the Montecito hills are where the celebrity exodus from Beverly Hills landed. San Ysidro Ranch, in those Montecito hills, is where the Kennedys honeymooned and Olivier married Vivien Leigh — thirty-eight bungalow-style cottages on five hundred acres of bougainvillea-draped land that Franciscan monks first farmed in the 1700s. The current owner, Ty Warner, restored the property to its 1930s Hollywood era; the underground wine cellar holds over twelve thousand bottles, some dating to the Second World War.

Greater Los Angeles stretches a hundred miles north-to-south along the coast, and the beach-side enclaves carry a different character to the canyon homes inland. Venice V Hotel, on the Venice Beach boardwalk, is the restored 1915 hotel that once hosted Charlie Chaplin and the early Hollywood elite — uniquely themed rooms with Pacific views, the oldest Otis elevator west of the Mississippi still in operation, and the Boardwalk's energy directly outside the door.

The Napa Valley, an hour and a half north of San Francisco, is the country's most established wine region — Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay grown across small AVAs from Carneros at the southern end up through Yountville, Oakville, Rutherford, St Helena to Calistoga at the northern tip. Yountville, halfway up the valley, is the gourmet hub: Thomas Keller's three-Michelin-star French Laundry sits in a stone cottage off the main street, and a string of Michelin-starred restaurants run alongside it. Napa Valley Lodge is a Tuscan-styled property in a working Cabernet vineyard within walking distance of French Laundry and Bouchon — a multi-generational family operation that pours complimentary champagne on arrival, runs weekly wine hours by the pool, and lends out bicycles for valley exploration.

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