Few California hotels have so convincingly argued that a new building can carry the emotional weight of somewhere old and loved. Shutters on the Beach, designed by Michael Rosenfeld with interiors by Michael S. Smith and opened in 1993, achieves this by drawing on the shingle-style vocabulary of East Coast beach houses — grey-painted clapboard, hipped rooflines, white balustrades stepping back in tiers from the sand — and transplanting it to Santa Monica's shoreline with enough conviction that it has always felt inherited rather than constructed. The five-storey structure along Ocean Avenue holds 198 rooms, most angled toward the Pacific, and the building's domestic scale at street level, broken into smaller pavilion-like masses punctuated by palms, keeps the massing from reading as institutional. Smith's interiors follow the same logic: faux-bamboo and turned-wood four-poster beds, indigo kantha throws, geometric dhurrie-style rugs in sea-glass blues and cream, plantation shutters admitting salt-bright California light rather than controlling it. The guestrooms visible in the images carry blue-and-white porcelain accents and floral upholstered armchairs that suggest a well-travelled beach house rather than a hotel room assembled to a brief. At the pool terrace, white pergolas frame navy-and-white striped cabanas, the horizon line of the Pacific completing the composition at dusk. The restaurant terrace, draped in climbing vines and strung with warm filament bulbs above marble bistro tables, extends the residential warmth into evening without any of the self-consciousness that tends to undermine that ambition elsewhere.

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Shutters on the Beach is more than just a spectacular place to stay, it’s the epitome of Southern California’s breezy lifestyle. This captivating hotel is located directly on the sand and within walking distance of the area’s biggest attractions including the Santa Monica Pier and hundreds of shops and restaurants. For business or pleasure, this quintessential beachfront hideaway is known as the place the high-profile go to be low-profile.