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...
Seventy-seven years is a long time betweenconcept and reality. Yet it took that long for one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s visions to make it from the drawing board to its ultimate foundation. In 1924, when the iconic architect was 56 years old, he was commissioned to...
Quietly, softly, humbly. The beloved kiawe tree at Halekulani resort in Honolulu, Hawaii, toppled over on August 21, 2016. The culprit? There was none: no vandalism, no hurricane, no unusual weather. Sometime in the middle of the night, the 133-year-old patriarch simply fell. The towering...
What museum can you spend the night in? And what building is more than a century old, yet brand-new? Those riddles find delightfully inviting answers at the 21c Museum Hotels. In an engagingly original combination of culture and hospitality, the boutique hotel collection may be reinventing...
In the early 1980s, what others saw as a pile of rocks, developer Rusty Lyon envisioned as a world-class destination. He snapped up 13,000 acres filled with boulders and cacti in the High Sonoran Desert foothills of Arizona. Then, he tapped architect Bob Bacon to...
Best known as the setting for the long-loved film “Pretty Woman,” the iconic Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, is a history-rich landmark. In January 1928, Beverly Hills was home to 18,000 residents, including movie stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino, and the...
A couple years ago, I fell asleep in a hotel room painted with sky blue walls and puffy clouds with faces on them; a little girl in ceremonial dress sat cross-legged, and a city on a hilltop rose in the distance. Above me, the ceiling...