Hotels

My lists

Best Western Hotel Tomo

Recycling is great for household goods but as it turns out it’s even better for hotels. Formerly the Best Western Miyako Inn, the Tomo is part of America’s great surplus of cheap-but-uninspired mid-century budget hotels, re-designed and re-purposed into a boutique hotel that takes its style cues ...

Clift Hotel

Once San Francisco’s grandest old-fashioned luxury hotel, the century-old Clift underwent a thorough re-imagining at the hands of Philippe Starck, who has transformed its faded Victorian elegance into its nearest modern equivalent — all black, ivory and steely grey, with rich textures in hardwood...

Good Hotel

That’s “good” as a noun, not an adjective. San Francisco’s Good Hotel is less about being a good hotel—it certainly is that, in its unassuming way—and more about doing good. It’s the ideal location for this sort of thing. It’s literally in the shadow of the city’s new federal ...

Hotel Adagio

Think of American boutique hotels and you’re probably thinking of hotels by Schrager or Balazs, in cities like New York or Los Angeles or Miami. All this time, however, Chip Conley’s Joie de Vivre group has been building a small empire in San Francisco — and one of its pillars, in the heart of th...

Hotel Drisco

Hotel Drisco’s most extraordinary feature has to be its location; while most of San Francisco’s hotels are clustered around the bustling downtown area, the Drisco makes its home in the sedate upscale residential district of Pacific Heights. This is the postcard vision of San Francisco...

Hotel Frank

San Francisco, already America’s highest-occupancy hotel town, has lately been upgrading its stock, and the Personality Hotels group has been at the front lines. Hotel Frank is a fine example of the new guard of stylish hotels around Union Square; though the classic building is pure historic San ...

Hotel Kabuki

Previously a slightly faded chain hotel, the Kabuki now belongs to San Francisco’s homegrown Joie de Vivre boutique hotel group. And under their direction it’s looking to recapture a bit of the optimistic jet-set romance that must have accompanied the opening of this modernist concrete high-rise ...

Hotel Rex

Those who aren’t fans of the 1930s detective stories may be unaware that San Francisco is the original hardboiled town. San Francisco crime had class—dames in silk stockings offering you two hundred to knock off tiresome husbands. Well, the Hotel Rex hasn’t forgotten this city&#...

Hotel Vertigo

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 ...

Hotel Vitale

One of the only brand-new ground-up hotel projects to open in San Francisco this decade, the Vitale stands on the newly revitalized Embarcadero, right across from the foodie mecca that is the rehabilitated Ferry Building. This is new-school luxury hospitality, distinct from the stately palaces of...

Mandarin Oriental San Francisco

The Mandarin Oriental hotels famously bring a taste of Far East ultra-luxury to American shores, and the San Francisco outpost goes even a step further; to the Asian-inspired décor and the top-flight service, add the simple fact that the Mandarin is San Francisco’s highest hotel, occupying ...

The Huntington Hotel & Nob Hill Spa

The Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins, both classic hotels (and tourist attractions) in their own right, sit just a block away — but for a quiet, classic elegance and a taste of old-world San Francisco there’s nothing like the Huntington Hotel. Atop Nob Hill, the Huntington is ideally situated ...

The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco

This majestic neoclassical building was the headquarters of an insurance company before being converted to a luxury hotel in 1991, and today it’s difficult to imagine it having ever been anything but a Ritz-Carlton, so perfectly is it suited to the task — midway between the old money of Nob...