Chateau Marmont

In November 1926, the story goes, the lawyer and developer Fred Horowitz pulled up to a barren hillside on an unpaved Sunset Boulevard, held up a snapshot of the Château d'Amboise in the Loire, and said yes. The Chateau Marmont opened its wooden doors on February 1, 1929, as a seven-storey apartment house in a fairy-tale French Gothic style. Eight months later the market crashed, Horowitz sold, and the apartments were let to short-term lodgers. That is how it became a hotel.

It has collected quotations ever since. 'If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont,' said Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures in 1939, installing William Holden and Glenn Ford in the penthouse. Billy Wilder said he would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel, and nearly did. André Balazs bought it in 1990 and restored it slowly, under the rallying cry 'Don't change anything!'.

The food is beside the point, and pleasantly so.

For most of its life it had no restaurant at all; it did not open one until 2003. The garden courtyard, tented over and strung with silk Fortuny lamps, is now the dining room people mean when they talk about having dinner at the Chateau. Sofia Coppola, who has been a regular since she was about eleven, puts the appeal plainly: 'It always had a decadent, playful spirit'.

The food is beside the point, and pleasantly so. Go late, in the garden, and order a drink before you decide anything else. Why it impresses: its story, as its chronicler Shawn Levy put it, 'parallels the story of Hollywood so thoroughly as to be inseparable from it'.

Text to ask.