Since its opening in 1926, the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel has galvanized its position as a San Francisco landmark. Located atop the city’s celebrated Nob Hill neighborhood, the hotel stands in the footprint of a grand Gothic-style mansion built by Mark Hopkins, one of the...
If the walls of room 222 at the Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado, could talk, overnight guests might hear tales of writer Louis L’Amour, who spent many days there, inspired by the gaiety and music emanating from the saloon directly beneath his room, fixated on...
Overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, approached by an allée of tall palm trees, the Grand Galvez stands as it has for more than a century. Newly renovated, the hotel exceeds her original grandeur, incorporating the elegance of the Gilded Age, enlivened with the charisma of...
When The Sea Ranch Lodge, overlooking the ocean in northern Sonoma County, reopened last October after a three-year-long renovation, the occasion represented not merely the return of a Western landmark. It also served as a stirring recommitment to a California enclave like none other. Stretching...
San Antonio, Texas, is replete with reminders of its Spanish history: Colonial Revival architecture, flower-decked balconies overlooking the San Antonio River, and Spanish street names. Amid this homage stands a structural tribute to the lesser-known German heritage that also helped shape this bustling city —...
When you’re a trustee of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, you know a thing or two about art. So when Philip Maritz put together his plan for The Ameswell Hotel in Mountain View, California, his vision to infuse contemporary paintings, sculptures, and photographs into...
In one of America’s most spectacular holiday displays, the Mission Inn presents its annual Festival of Lights for six weeks starting the day after Thanksgiving. More than four million electric bulbs decorate the square-block property in an extravaganza that includes upwards of 400 animated figures,...
Nestled in the Chianti Mountains between the West Texas towns of Marfa and Presidio, Cibolo Creek Ranch is a resort that combines five-star elegance with the charm of 19th-century pioneer life. Bearing the Comanche name for the bison that once roamed this area, Cibolo is...
After Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy on September 12, 1953, they did not honeymoon in the Caribbean or Europe. And when the 38-year-old First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, his wife, Clementine, and their children escaped the English winter of 1912...
In the Roaring ’20s — a decade of prosperity as the U.S. bounced back from World War I — anyone who was anyone knew about the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska. Constructed in 1916 and converted into a hotel in 1920, it was a premier...