Hotel Vertigo

Hotel description

Back when it was called the Empire, this downtown San Francisco classic played a role in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Now, after a very thorough renovation and re-branding, the film plays on a loop in the lobby. Recently, as the York, it was showing its age — but that was before the reins were handed to the Californian designer Thomas Schoos, whose baroque-modern sensibility is perfectly suited to the Vertigo’s dizzying mix of old and new.

The location places you midway up Nob Hill, a couple blocks west of Union Square, perfectly situated for shopping and sightseeing, yet integrated into the neighborhood and off the main tourist drag. The rooms aren’t huge, but none in San Francisco are, and what they lack in sheer acreage they make up for in personality, with modern fixtures alongside antique-style chairs and some charmingly oddball objets d’art.

There’s no restaurant just yet, but in this town you’re never more than fifty yards from good food. Anyway, they’re working on it. It doesn’t change the fact that the Vertigo has come out of nowhere, and is suddenly one of the most stylish in town — and if you know San Francisco you know how uncommon that is.