Is San Francisco a world-class city? It’s a question its residents hate, and with good reason. San Francisco has more private wealth than Boston, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., combined, and its G.D.P. is larger than Dallas’s. Many consider it America’s most beautiful city. But if it is a world-class city, what is its world-class hotel? The hotel that doesn’t just provide a place to bed down but reflects the city’s grandest vision of itself—a Carlyle or Claridge’s or, in the case of a smaller city like San Francisco, a miniature grande dame like the Beau-Rivage Genève.
For many years in San Francisco, that place was the Huntington Hotel, a stately brick high-rise atop Nob Hill, just around the corner from the original Fairmont San Francisco—the chain’s first—and across from the Pacific-Union Club. The Huntington had an odd duality: its neon marquee loomed overhead, broadcasting the hotel’s presence from the city’s highest point, yet the hotel itself was strictly for insiders. Like the Carlyle and Chateau Marmont, the property originated in 1922 as a luxury apartment building, then, in the 1950s, found its niche as an intimate hotel for the rich and renowned. Actresses from Lauren Bacall to Marlene Dietrich to Claudette Colbert stopped in, socializing with rock stars and politicians before retreating to unusually large rooms protected by an unusually discreet staff.
