Cocktails at the Polo Lounge, 15 cents in 1944, now start at $17. Rooms, decorated with peachy marble bathroom floors and green granite countertops, now run upwards of $500 a night. Five bungalows date to 1915, while new presidential bungalows unveiled last year include outdoor rain showers. Today it has more than 200 rooms and suites, including 23 private bungalows big enough to accommodate staffs and families. In 1992, the hotel closed for a $100 million restoration, reopening in 1995. The hotel was bought by the Brunei Investment Agency in 1987 and is now part of the agency’s Dorchester Collection of luxury hotel properties. The Great Depression forced the hotel to close in 1933 and reopen 10 months later under the ownership of Bank of America before being sold again later, according to Anderson’s book. There have also been financial ups and downs. Gone are stables for guests’ horses the school, movie theater, billiard room and bowling alley that were once downstairs and fox hunts that were staged in nearby barren hills. The hotel was nicknamed the “Pink Palace” after being painted a salmon hue in 1948 to reflect light shades of the sunset. Williams also designed the more casual Fountain Coffee Room below the lobby, which still has a curved dark counter and green banana leaf wallpaper. In the 1940s, African-American architect Paul Williams designed the hotel’s looping handwritten script logo and redesigned the Polo Lounge, which had previously been called El Jardin. ![]() If you’re wielding a heavy-duty camera, they ask you what the hell you’re doing.”įour stories high, surrounded by acres of gardens and flowers, the hotel evokes a lush Mediterranean fantasy island, decorated with banana leaves, palm fronds and fuchsia azaleas. “For example, even getting through the front door. “Stars felt safe here, as they do today,” said Anderson. The hotel remains a place where celebrities can let down their hair, attracting the East Coast elite as well as Hollywood locals. One night Prince was up here singing to some girl in a suite upstairs, in the `80s. “She was well-behaved, and he wasn’t,” said Anderson, laughing. Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in bed for a week in another bungalow. That acre of land now is probably worth $25 million.” “An acre of land was set aside for the guests to grow vegetables and flowers while staying here, so they would feel at home. Anderson during lunch in late April in the Polo Lounge, beneath its green-and-white striped patio ceiling. “Elmer Grey designed the hotel in such a way so that every room got sunlight in one point of the day or another,” said Robert S. Anderson, the hotel’s official historian and great-grandson of its founder, tells the hotel’s story, from its beginnings amid acres of bean fields, to the present day, when celebs such as director Sofia Coppola think nothing of stopping by the coffee shop for a bite with friends.Īnderson’s great-grandmother Margaret Anderson – who managed a hotel on the site of what’s now the Hollywood & Highland Center, where the Academy Awards are held – built the Beverly Hills Hotel for $500,000 with architect Elmer Grey. In his new book “The Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows – The First 100 Years,” Robert S. Its breezy, old Hollywood air comes from an incomparable list of superstar guests that has ranged over the decades from Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant and Clark Gable, to John Lennon and Jack Nicholson, to the androgynously elegant Marlene Dietrich, who convinced the hotel’s Polo Lounge restaurant to change its “no slacks for women” dress code in the 1940s. ![]() ![]() It remains one of the swankiest destinations in Southern California, home to Oscar and Grammy parties and star-filled lunches. ![]() The luxury hotel on Sunset Boulevard marks 100 years since it opened May 12, 1912, two years before the city of Beverly Hills itself was built around it. BEVERLY HILLS – Stand on the Beverly Hills Hotel’s red carpet, leading into its chandeliered lobby, and you can’t help but visualize a century’s worth of celebrities, royalty, politicians, musicians and actors who have stayed there, from Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to Madonna, Reese Witherspoon and Katy Perry.
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