Best hotels in San Francisco, CA | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in San Francisco, CA.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in San Francisco, CA

The fog that rolls through the Golden Gate each evening does something unusual to San Francisco's built environment — it flattens the light, softens the edges, and makes the city's persistent argument between preservation and reinvention feel almost philosophical. That tension plays out most visibly in the hotel choices available to a design-conscious visitor. Nob Hill is the obvious starting point for anyone drawn to institutional grandeur: the Fairmont, perched above the cable car terminus, carries the full weight of its 1907 reopening after the earthquake, while the Ritz-Carlton occupies a former Metropolitan Life Insurance Company building on Nob Hill's edge, its neoclassical bones intact beneath the renovation. Neither is making a contemporary design statement, but both are making a different kind of argument — about permanence, about San Francisco's stubborn relationship with its own mythology. SoMa and the Embarcadero represent the city's more considered architectural conversation. The St. Regis San Francisco, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and completed in 2005, anchors the museum district end of Third Street in a slim glass tower with calm, art-forward interiors adjacent to SFMOMA. A few blocks north along the waterfront, 1 Hotel San Francisco brings the brand's biophilic material palette — reclaimed wood, raw concrete, living walls — to the Embarcadero with a commitment to sustainability that feels less performative here than it might elsewhere, given the Bay's immediate physical presence. The Palace Hotel on New Montgomery, with its extraordinary Garden Court atrium dating to 1909 and restored glass ceiling, remains one of the genuinely beautiful rooms in American hotel history, even as the surrounding property has aged unevenly. In Mid-Market, the San Francisco Proper Hotel occupies a landmarked 1962 Corbusian structure renovated by Kelly Wearstler, whose maximalist interiors — layered textiles, graphic tile, art-saturated walls — do exactly what that stretch of Market Street needs: assert that design ambition hasn't abandoned the neighborhood. The most interesting stays, though, sit at the city's geographic margins. Hotel Drisco in Pacific Heights is a quiet residential anomaly — small-scaled, understated, in a neighborhood where you feel like a local rather than a guest. Cavallo Point Lodge in Fort Baker occupies the former U.S. Army base at the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, pairing historic Colonial Revival officers' quarters with contemporary timber lodges by the firm EHDD, with views of the bridge that no amount of editorial restraint can make sound ordinary. The Battery in the Financial District operates as a private members club with hotel rooms — deliberately opaque, specifically Californian in its version of exclusivity.

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San Francisco Proper Hotel

San Francisco, CA • Mid Market • OPTIMIZE

avg. $230 / night

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San Francisco Proper Hotel Design Editorial

At the corner of Market and Fell Streets, where the Mid-Market corridor has spent a decade negotiating between neglect and reinvention, a seven-story 1909 Beaux-Arts brick building that once housed the Renoir Hotel was transformed in 2017 into San Francisco Proper Hotel — a 131-room property that placed Kelly Wearstler's interiors inside one of the city's more quietly distinguished Edwardian envelopes. The facade's arched windows, terra-cotta cornice detailing, and warm red brick survive intact, a streetcar rattling past on Market Street completing a scene that could belong to almost any decade of the building's life. Inside, Wearstler's signature moves are fully deployed but calibrated to the building's bones rather than overriding them. The ground-floor restaurant, Villon, runs a double-height teal-washed dining room with fluted pilaster walls, ruffled plaster pendant lights, and mismatched dining chairs — ochre cane, leather barrel backs, woven upholstery — arranged across a patterned stone floor inlaid with brass. Guestrooms layer bold monochrome floral wallpapers against light oak plank floors, the beds set on hairpin legs and layered with striped coverlets and kilim-style rugs in overlapping scales, while the rooftop bar climbs further into pattern overload: checkerboard walls, floral velvet sofas, Gio Ponti-adjacent bar stools in blush leather, and red lacquered columns framing a panorama across the bay.

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Hotel Emblem San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Union Square • OPTIMIZE

avg. $256 / night

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Hotel Emblem San Francisco Design Editorial

Built in 1915 on Powell Street at the edge of Union Square, the ornate brick structure that houses Hotel Emblem San Francisco wears its Beaux-Arts origins openly — decorative cornices, elaborate ironwork fire escapes cascading down the facade in layered zigzag geometry, the whole thing glowing amber against the San Francisco dusk like a period film set that somehow stayed standing through a century of earthquakes and reinventions. Viceroy Hotel Group repositioned the property in 2017 with interiors conceived around the Beat Generation writers who once haunted this neighborhood, treating the literary counterculture of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg not as wallpaper nostalgia but as a genuine design language. The lobby channels that intent through wide-plank walnut floors, a stacked-stone accent wall, dark-painted ceilings, and a reception desk low enough to feel like a conversation rather than a transaction — a vintage typewriter placed nearby as a knowing prop. Guestrooms across the property's 96 keys carry sage grasscloth walls, cobalt-lacquered armoires, crimson settees, and abstract patterned carpets in charcoal and cream, with oversized works by artist Lebo mounted above walnut headboards — their ink-heavy figures, newspaper-collage backgrounds, and expressionist line work giving each room the feeling of a gallery wall someone actually lives among. The bar opens into broad communal tables, brass pendant clusters, and more large-format portraiture, the whole ground floor operating with the loose energy of a literary salon that happens to pour excellent cocktails.

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Four Seasons San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Union Square • SPLURGE

avg. $402 / night

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Four Seasons San Francisco Design Editorial

Fitted into the base of a mid-rise tower at 757 Market Street, where San Francisco's Financial District shoulders into the retail corridor south of Union Square, the Four Seasons San Francisco opened in 2001 as part of a mixed-use development that also houses the Museum of Modern Art's former satellite spaces and private residences above. The porte-cochère visible in the images captures the building's architectural register precisely — polished steel cladding on the canopy columns, a curving soffit panelled in brushed metal, and uplighting that gives the arrival sequence a sleek, corporate-civic confidence more common to late-1990s tower architecture than to traditional hotel placemaking. Inside, the 277 rooms and suites were conceived with a restrained California palette: the guest rooms show grass-cloth-effect wallcoverings, leather bench seating, geometric carpet in blue and grey, and brass-accented nightstands topped in white marble, the whole calibrated to suggest a well-edited private apartment rather than a conventional hotel room. The dining spaces lean into a warmer, more enveloping register. The restaurant interior deploys warm-toned hardwood panelling, deeply curved leather banquettes, and a coffered ceiling rhythm broken by cylindrical pendant lights — a room that draws on the American steakhouse tradition without quite committing to it. The bar carries the same wood-forward approach, its coffered ceiling fitted with mercury-glass dome pendants and the tables surfaced in veined rose marble, the effect closer to a private club than a hotel lounge.

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1 Hotel San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Embarcadero • SPLURGE

avg. $406 / night

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1 Hotel San Francisco Design Editorial

At the foot of the Embarcadero, where the Ferry Building's shadow falls across San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge rises in the middle distance, a nine-story brick-and-glass building draws a curved corner toward the waterfront with the self-assurance of something that has always belonged here. It hasn't — 1 Hotel San Francisco opened in 2021 — but Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's design for the 200-room property earns that confidence through warm terracotta brick cladding, dark steel window mullions, and a rotunda tower that resolves the corner without resorting to spectacle. The SH Hotels & Resorts brand, whose design language runs on reclaimed material and ecological intent, found in this Embarcadero site a setting that matched its ambitions exactly. Interior designer Yabu Pushelberg shaped the public spaces and rooms around the view those curved facades make possible: the rotunda lounge presents wide-plank white oak floors, live-edge burl side tables, leather banquettes, and an organic chandelier suspended from a plastered coffered ceiling, every surface angled toward the panorama of Rincon Park and the Bay. Guestrooms continue the material conversation — reclaimed wood headwall panels fitted with copper-shaded pendant lights, charcoal wool carpet, saddle-leather bed frames, and floor-to-ceiling windows framing the bridge. The restaurant carries the same biophilic logic upward through arched white openings draped in cascading ferns, rattan globe pendants gathering over dark-framed communal tables. The effect throughout is less hotel than informed Northern California habitat.

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St. Regis Hotel San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • SoMa • SPLURGE

avg. $418 / night

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Marriott Bonvoy® property

St. Regis Hotel San Francisco Design Editorial

Rising above SoMa on Third Street with SFMOMA as its immediate neighbor, the 40-story tower designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gives the St. Regis San Francisco a cultural address that few luxury hotels in the city can match. Completed in 2005, the building's glass-and-limestone curtain wall steps back as it climbs, the pale green-tinted glazing catching the Bay's diffuse light in a way that distinguishes it from the harder commercial towers surrounding it. The hotel fills the lower 19 floors of a mixed-use structure containing 260 guest rooms, with residences occupying the upper reaches. The interiors, refreshed in recent years, work a palette of terracotta, warm walnut, blush-toned carpet, and cognac leather that pulls the California light indoors without straining for a West Coast cliché. Guest rooms carry large-format abstract works — fragmented stone compositions visible in the images — framed against white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that frame SFMOMA's Mario Botta facade and the broader Financial District skyline. The food and beverage spaces demonstrate a more theatrical ambition: the bar and lounge are wrapped in vaulted brass latticework and furnished with teal velvet bucket chairs, coral banquettes, and graphic diamond-patterned barstools, the herringbone oak floor anchoring what might otherwise tip into excess. The all-day dining room takes a lighter hand, green ceramic tile, sheer linen curtains, and marble-topped tables composing a room that feels closer to a well-considered San Francisco restaurant than a hotel amenity.

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The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco - Image 1

The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco - Image 2

The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco - Image 3

The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Nob Hill • SPLURGE

avg. $422 / night

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The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco Design Editorial

The Ionic colonnade and sculptural pediment visible at the entrance belong not to a courthouse or civic hall but to a former Masonic Memorial Temple, completed in 1909 and rebuilt after the great earthquake — a Beaux-Arts monument on Nob Hill that the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco has inhabited since 1991. The conversion, overseen by Gary Handel of Handel Architects, preserved the neoclassical shell while carving 336 rooms across the building's upper floors. Views from the higher suites frame Coit Tower and the Telegraph Hill rooftops with a directness that no purpose-built hotel on this block could manufacture. The interiors navigate the familiar Ritz-Carlton tension between institutional grandeur and something warmer, and they largely succeed. Guest rooms arrive in a grey-and-ivory palette — linen-upholstered headboards with nailhead trim, Roman shades filtering northern California light, tufted settees in dove velvet — with wainscoting and coffered ceilings reinforcing the building's classical bones. The bar and lounge spaces push harder into drama: charcoal-panelled walls, red-backlit bar counters in honed stone, tiered brass-and-glass chandeliers descending from double-height ceilings, deep-buttoned Chesterfield sofas alongside ikat-patterned armchairs in burgundy and tobacco. The marble fireplace anchoring the lounge grounds what might otherwise feel calculated into something that carries genuine atmosphere.

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Hotel Drisco

San Francisco, CA • Pacific Heights • SPLURGE

avg. $591 / night

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Hotel Drisco Design Editorial

At the crest of Pacific Heights, where Broadway meets Broderick and the city drops away toward the Marina and the bay beyond, a five-storey Edwardian apartment building has anchored this residential block since 1903. Hotel Drisco — one of San Francisco's most quietly authoritative small hotels, with just 48 rooms across its upper floors — survived the 1906 earthquake and served for decades as a rooming house for the neighborhood's professional class before its transformation into a boutique hotel. The cream-painted stucco facade, its cornice articulated with dentil molding and its bay windows stepping rhythmically across the street elevation, carries the composed dignity of the pre-quake city's domestic architecture. Inside, the interiors strike a balance between Edwardian propriety and a cleaner contemporary sensibility, a tension the design navigates with considerable assurance. Rooms are finished in warm greige tones with white-painted wainscoting, geometric-patterned broadloom carpets, and dark mahogany case furniture — nightstands, chests of drawers, and open shelving units with brass ring pulls — grounded by sputnik-style brass chandeliers that inject a mid-century counterpoint into otherwise traditional rooms. The club lounge shifts register entirely: wide-plank oak floors, a tray ceiling with a starburst brass fixture overhead, and scallop-patterned gold wallcovering give the space a warmer, more enveloping atmosphere. Woven Roman shades, Chippendale-inflected accent chairs, and botanical prints on the walls reinforce the sense that this is a private residence of some taste, operating quietly as a hotel.

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The Battery

San Francisco, CA • Financial District • OVER THE TOP

avg. $744 / night

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The Battery Design Editorial

Cerused oak covers almost every surface of the lobby and lounge at The Battery — walls, columns, ceiling coffers — its grain bleached and wire-brushed to a pewter-silver finish that gives the Financial District private club, opened in 2013, the feeling of a very glamorous shipwreck. The building itself is a converted 1907 structure on Vallejo Street, and designers Ken Fulk and Patrick Crane worked the bones of that Edwardian warehouse into something that sits closer to a maximalist private residence than a hotel. The check-in desk, framed by raw Douglas fir columns and backed by walls of aged steel card-catalog drawers multiplied in a mirror, sets the tone: accumulation as aesthetic, every surface loaded with intention. Across the property's 14 floors and 48 guest rooms, that sensibility shifts register without losing coherence. Rooms in the historic wing retain exposed brick chimneys and bay windows with period mouldings, furnished with tan leather headboards, striped armchairs, and brass pendant fixtures — a more restrained, club-adjacent language. Rooms in the newer tower open entirely to the city through floor-to-ceiling glass, polished chrome four-poster frames and herringbone oak floors carrying a mid-century cool against the downtown skyline. The ground-floor bar, housed in the original timber structure with its cathedral grid of Douglas fir beams fixed with blackened steel plates, anchors everything — a room that manages warmth and volume in equal measure, taxidermy and tropical planting included.

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Hotel Zetta San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • SoMa • OPTIMIZE

avg. $176 / night

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Hotel Zetta San Francisco Design Editorial

Pitched squarely at San Francisco's technology corridor, where SoMa's Victorian commercial streetscape gives way to the glass towers of the startup economy, Hotel Zetta opened in 2013 inside a handsomely proportioned early twentieth-century building whose arched ground-floor facade — white-painted pilasters framing tall glazed arches, a rhythm both formal and welcoming — gives little away about what interior designer Dawna Cahill of Pedersen Associates has assembled within. The brief was essentially to build a hotel for people who find hotel lobbies tedious, and the response was to make the ground floor feel closer to a creative studio than a reception hall. The lobby, called the Playroom, mixes a pool table, a wall-mounted bullseye game constructed from bottle caps, and a bar whose back panel is stacked floor-to-ceiling with wine bottles — an installation that functions simultaneously as sculpture and stock. Whitewashed shiplap paneling anchors the bar wall alongside a gallery of black-and-white music photography, while a sculptural metal chandelier hovers above the white Corian counter. Guest rooms carry a more restrained palette — dark-stained oak floors, leather-upholstered headboards backed by illuminated walnut panels that give rooms their warmest feature, kilim-style rugs grounding the otherwise cool grey interiors, and wire-frame task chairs nods to midcentury office culture. The 116-room property manages the trick of feeling both deliberately playful and genuinely composed.

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Hotel Zelos San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • SoMa • OPTIMIZE

avg. $189 / night

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Hotel Zelos San Francisco Design Editorial

At the corner of Fifth and Mission in downtown San Francisco, a nine-story Beaux-Arts building clad in distinctive celadon-glazed terra cotta has anchored the SoMa streetscape since 1909, its rounded corner tower and arched ground-floor arcade surviving the earthquake and fire of the previous year's devastation. The building, designed by the firm Reid Brothers, became Hotel Zelos San Francisco when Provenance Hotels reimagined it in 2014, commissioning interior designer Nicole Hollis to thread a sharp contemporary sensibility through its ornate historic shell. Hollis set the rooms in a palette of warm taupe and charcoal, with linear textured carpeting, arc floor lamps in brushed chrome, and large-format photographic artworks — hyperreal digital portraits of ambiguous, otherworldly figures — anchoring each headboard wall in a way that makes the technology-and-humanity theme feel considered rather than decorative. The 202 guest rooms carry the same tension between the building's Edwardian bones and a deliberately futurist point of view. Downstairs, the bar space amplifies this: perforated metal ceiling panels backlit to a warm amber glow, oversized globe pendants, and low wrap-around lounge chairs in slate blue linen arranged around medallion-patterned carpet. Outside, a courtyard terrace screened by stands of bamboo runs a linear fire feature down its center spine, with wire-frame side chairs and a retractable canopy — urban, restrained, and far more considered than the building's ornate facade would lead you to expect.

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W San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Union Square • OPTIMIZE

avg. $238 / night

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Marriott Bonvoy® property

W San Francisco Design Editorial

Directly across Third Street from Mario Botta's San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a 31-floor limestone-clad tower that opened in 1998 gives the W San Francisco one of the more culturally charged addresses in the city's SoMa district. The building, designed by Hornberger + Worstell, carries the postmodern classicism typical of late-1990s American hotel construction — set-back crown, symmetrical fenestration, a podium base that anchors the tower to the street grid — while the interior has been substantially reworked over successive renovations to keep pace with the W brand's evolution from Ian Schrager-era nightclub aesthetic toward something with more graphic energy. The guest rooms, visible in the images, show that graphic energy clearly: faceted gold headboard panels arranged in angular, origami-like geometry rise against white lacquered walls, while charcoal carpet printed with gold triangular motifs and fuchsia-accented bedding push the palette hard. The double-height restaurant space works a more considered register — sheer chain-link curtains diffusing light across walnut-topped tables, globe pendant clusters descending through the void, white upholstered dining chairs grounding the room in something closer to calm. The bar leans back into pure spectacle, chrome mesh columns catching LED-blue uplighting beside white lacquer bar stools. The 404-room property has always been most alive at night, when the tower's position beside Botta's terracotta drum makes the two buildings feel like they belong to the same late-century conversation about urban confidence.

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Cavallo Point Lodge

San Francisco, CA • Fort Baker • SPLURGE

avg. $359 / night

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I Prefer property

Cavallo Point Lodge Design Editorial

At the northern foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the Marin Headlands slope down to meet San Francisco Bay, a cluster of white-painted Craftsman-era buildings dating to the early twentieth century once served as the officer quarters of Fort Baker. That military past gives Cavallo Point Lodge its structural spine — 28 of the property's 142 rooms are fitted into these original Colonial Revival houses, their warm ochre interiors, radiator grilles, double-hung sash windows, and sloped attic ceilings preserved more or less as found, furnished with dark-stained platform beds, leather club chairs, and framed black-and-white photography that keeps the atmosphere closer to a well-appointed historic home than a resort. The contemporary lodges, designed by the San Francisco firm CCS Architecture and completed when the property opened in 2008, take a different approach entirely. Cedar-clad ceilings, floor-to-ceiling glazing on bronze-toned aluminum frames, and tawny leather seating grouped around gas fireplaces give these rooms a Pacific Northwest warmth that connects them to the eucalyptus groves and grassland outside without mimicking the historic buildings. The spa and lodge building, visible in the images with its double-height glass facade and teak pergola, anchors a terraced garden with a fire pit surround and a pool stepped into the hillside. Inside the historic mess hall, now a bar and restaurant, an original pressed-tin ceiling and cast-iron columns survive intact, the space layered with blue velvet banquette seating, plaid armchairs, globe pendant lights on brass fittings, and a veined marble bar counter.

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Hotel Zeppelin San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Union Square • SPLURGE

avg. $381 / night

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Hotel Zeppelin San Francisco Design Editorial

At 545 Post Street, half a block from Union Square, a cream-glazed brick building erected in 1913 has led several lives before arriving at its current one. Originally the Savoy Hotel, it survived the 1906 earthquake's aftermath and spent decades absorbing the particular energy of San Francisco's Tenderloin edge — a neighborhood that has always sat at the intersection of counterculture and commerce. Hotel Zeppelin, which took over the property in 2016 under Viceroy Hotel Group, channels that history through a design concept organized around the city's legacy of artistic rebellion, with interiors by Megan Pittman drawing on rock music, Beat Generation literature, and psychedelic poster art as organizing references. The rooms carry the concept with more restraint than the public spaces might suggest. Bay windows — original to the Edwardian structure — anchor each guestroom in recognizable San Francisco geometry, while the interiors layer charcoal tufted headboards against deep olive walls, crushed-velvet cushions in plum, and geometric-patterned carpet that owes something to 1970s California textile design. Downstairs, the lobby bar exposes the building's original brick behind a white-painted Victorian mantelpiece, tan leather chairs arranged around marble-topped side tables on a deep purple rug — an atmosphere closer to a well-curated private club than a hotel lounge. The restaurant space keeps the same exposed masonry, a globe cluster pendant casting warm light across black-and-white checkerboard tile and large-format photographic prints.

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Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero - Image 1

Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero - Image 2

Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero - Image 3

Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero

San Francisco, CA • Embarcadero • SPLURGE

avg. $397 / night

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Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero Design Editorial

Rising 48 floors above the Financial District at 345 California Street, the slender tower that houses the Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 2001 as part of a mixed-use development sharing its base with the Embarcadero Center complex. The building's pale aluminum cladding and chamfered profile give it a distinctly vertical emphasis, visible in the images as it tapers skyward above its older brick and limestone neighbors — a contrast that marks the hotel's position at the edge of the city's historic commercial core and its newer waterfront district. The interiors, refreshed in recent years, carry a palette of warm taupe and greige anchored by wide-plank wood flooring and geometric area rugs in terracotta, slate, and charcoal. Guest rooms at upper floors frame panoramic views of the Bay Bridge and Marin headlands through floor-to-ceiling bronze-trimmed windows, the furnishings — a round black marble-topped occasional table, cognac leather ottomans, crimson upholstered armchairs — chosen for a quietly contemporary residential register rather than corporate anonymity. The ground-floor restaurant and bar lean into a mid-century-inflected warmth: walnut wall paneling, hammered copper-glass room dividers set in black steel frames, pendant fixtures strung like candlelight, and a bar counter faced with fluted brass detail that gives the space a low, amber glow well suited to a city that has always taken its cocktail hour seriously.

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Casa Madrona Hotel & Spa

San Francisco, CA • Sausalito • SPLURGE

avg. $407 / night

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Casa Madrona Hotel & Spa Design Editorial

Cascading down a Sausalito hillside toward Richardson Bay, a Victorian mansion built in 1885 anchors one end of Casa Madrona Hotel & Spa while a more recent four-storey addition in stucco and stone holds the street edge below — the two structures separated by decades but stitched together by terraced gardens and interconnecting stairs. That layered quality, part historic house, part contemporary hotel block, gives the property its particular character: no two rooms share the same geometry, the same ceiling height, or quite the same view of the marina and the San Francisco Bay beyond. The interiors vary accordingly. Rooms in the new wing run to dark-stained four-poster beds, navy plaid carpet, and wrought-iron balcony rails overlooking the yacht-filled harbour — a maritime register that stops well short of nautical cliché. Up in the Victorian cottage section, the atmosphere shifts entirely: white-painted exposed beams, wide-plank walnut floors, skylights cutting into pitched roofs, and cream linen armchairs arranged toward water views through louvered plantation shutters. The outdoor terrace, visible in the images at dusk, uses laser-cut metal screens and teak-framed lounge furniture around gas fire tables — a contemporary layer added with enough restraint not to jar against the older fabric. The street-level restaurant, Poggio, announces itself with cobalt-striped awnings along Bridgeway, its terrace tables set with white linen against the foot traffic of the waterfront.

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The Jay, Autograph Collection

San Francisco, CA • Financial District • SPLURGE

avg. $462 / night

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The Jay, Autograph Collection Design Editorial

John Portman's corrugated concrete tower has always demanded attention from Kearny Street — its serrated facade stepping skyward in a rhythm that makes neighboring buildings seem almost apologetic by comparison. What that 1988 structure needed, it turned out, was not a softening but a conversation partner. The Jay, Autograph Collection, which arrived in November 2023 following a multi-million dollar renovation by New York firm AvroKO, provides exactly that. The designers came armed with a concept they called warm brutalism, and across 360 rooms spread over 24 floors, they make a persuasive case for it. The exterior's exposed concrete meets its interior counterargument in warm-toned white oak millwork, upholstered wall panels glowing amber from concealed underlighting, and custom furnishings whose low, platform profiles feel drawn from Japanese residential design. Suites use slatted timber screens to divide sleeping from living without walls, creating a sense of layered depth that the raw building itself could never achieve alone. The bar and lounge push further still — bold stripe-woven sofas, polished brass pendant clusters, and generous leather seating arranged around a circular bar whose ribbed gold canopy mirrors the vertical fins of the facade outside. In the restaurant, patterned tile floors meet cognac leather banquettes and fluted-glass shelving, with oversized monstera plants pressing against floor-to-ceiling windows. The effect is a building finally in dialogue with itself.

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The Fairmont San Francisco

San Francisco, CA • Nob Hill • OVER THE TOP

avg. $744 / night

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ALL - Accor property

The Fairmont San Francisco Design Editorial

Atop Nob Hill, where San Francisco's cable car lines converge at the city's highest social address, a Beaux-Arts granite palace designed by Reid & Reid was nearly complete when the 1906 earthquake struck, leaving its shell standing while the city burned below. That structural resilience became the founding myth of the Fairmont San Francisco, which opened just a year later in 1907 after Julia Morgan — one of the first women licensed to practice architecture in California — oversaw the rebuilding of its interiors. The facade visible in the images carries the full grammar of Edwardian civic ambition: rusticated base, colossal pilasters, an arched porte-cochere draped in the flags of visiting nations, and a roofline cornice that reads as institutional permanence rather than mere grandeur. Inside, the property's 606 rooms span the original building and a tower addition, the contrast between the two shaping an unusually varied interior world. The Laurel Court restaurant, with its rotunda of marbled Ionic columns, gilded plasterwork frieze, and Tuscan landscape murals, anchors the ground floor in its Edwardian origins, while the tower suites present a cooler contemporary register — cream leather upholstered headboards, ebonized nightstands, and geometric patterned carpets in taupe and gold. Most improbable of all is the Tonga Room, a tiki bar carved from the hotel's original indoor swimming pool in 1945, its green lagoon and thatch-roofed bandstand surviving intact as one of American hospitality's most committed acts of theatrical escapism.

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Palace Hotel, A Luxury Collection Hotel - Image 1

Palace Hotel, A Luxury Collection Hotel - Image 2

Palace Hotel, A Luxury Collection Hotel - Image 3

Palace Hotel, A Luxury Collection Hotel

San Francisco, CA • SoMa • SPLURGE

avg. $294 / night

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Marriott Bonvoy® property

Palace Hotel, A Luxury Collection Hotel Design Editorial

When William Ralston opened the original Palace Hotel on New Market Street in 1875, it was the largest hotel in the world — a seven-story sandstone colossus with a glass-roofed carriage court that San Francisco considered proof of its own ambition. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed it entirely, and the rebuilt Palace Hotel A Luxury Collection Hotel, completed in 1909 to designs by architect George Kelham, rose on the same footprint with a Beaux-Arts facade of pale terracotta and rusticated stone that still anchors the corner of New Montgomery and Market today. Its most celebrated interior — the Garden Court, whose leaded art glass dome spans the former carriage court beneath a canopy of gilded plasterwork and fluted marble columns — remains one of the great civic rooms in American hospitality, a space that has hosted every president since Woodrow Wilson. The 556-room, nine-floor building carries that grandeur into its guest floors with varying degrees of conviction. Recent renovations introduced darkened four-poster beds with tapered brass lamps and lacquered nightstands in cerused cream and ebony, set against pale-blue walls and crown moldings intact from the Kelham rebuild. Standard rooms take a warmer register — tufted benches, warm walnut cabinetry, deep-pile carpets in indigo and rust. The indoor lap pool, fitted beneath a vaulted steel-and-glass barrel roof within the building's interior court, channels the same Victorian conservatory logic that made the Garden Court famous, filtered through a cleaner, more contemporary material palette of travertine and cream plaster.