Hotel del Coronado

The Hotel del Coronado is one of the very few hotels that reads as a national monument from half a mile down the beach. Opened in 1888 on the sandy spit across the bay from San Diego, its white clapboard walls, red-shingled turrets and acres of gabled roofline make it the largest and most flamboyant survivor of the great Victorian wooden seaside resorts, and a designated National Historic Landmark. Thomas Edison's electric light, visiting presidents and the persistent legend that the Duke of Windsor first glimpsed Wallis Simpson here have all fed a mythology few resorts can match.

Hollywood sealed it: Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, was famously filmed on this beach in 1958, and the hotel has been trading happily on the association ever since. A long-running programme of restoration and expansion has added contemporary room wings, a spa and smartened public spaces around the original Victorian building, whose Crown Room ceiling—built of sugar pine without a single visible nail—remains a marvel.

Today the Del works on two registers at once. It is a big, cheerful, all-American family beach resort, with surf lessons, ice-cream parlours and one of the widest, most swimmable strands in Southern California; and it is a piece of living architectural history that rewards simply wandering the verandas at dusk. Purists should book in the Victorian building; families may prefer the newer ocean-facing wings.