Chateau Marmont

Chateau Marmont is less a hotel than a Hollywood institution with beds. Modelled loosely on a Loire Valley château and opened in 1929 on a rise above Sunset Boulevard, it became the industry's sanctioned hideaway almost immediately—the place studio bosses reputedly told their stars to go when they wanted to misbehave out of sight. A century of legend has accreted since: Bogart and Bacall, Led Zeppelin's motorcycles in the lobby, writers finishing scripts in the bungalows, and enough discreetly unrecorded history to fill several banned memoirs.

The physical hotel trades on romantic imperfection. Rooms, suites, cottages and bungalows are individually furnished with a flea-market-aristocrat sensibility—worn velvet, mismatched antiques, deep balconies overlooking the Sunset Strip or the hillside gardens—and many retain kitchens from the building's apartment-house origins. The garden terrace restaurant, open to guests and a carefully tended circle of regulars, remains one of Los Angeles' most watchful people-watching rooms, and the small hedge-screened pool has its own mythology.

This is not a hotel of thread-count metrics and spa menus; service is personal, protective and famously discreet rather than corporate-polished, and the fabric wears its age on purpose. Guests who want gloss should look down the Strip. Guests who want to sleep inside Hollywood's collective unconscious, cocktail on the terrace at dusk, have exactly one address.