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.

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