Everybody’s got their Los Angeles. For the locals it’s a very real place caught between natural beauty and disaster, perpetually “close to the edge,” as Joan Didion so memorably put it. For visitors, even those from Northern California like me, L.A. exists in the imagination, as a flickering vision projected in the mind’s eye of David Hockney pools, beautiful movie stars, music drifting down secluded canyons.

Few places have shaped my sense of the city as an enchanted Shangri-La more than the Beverly Hills Hotel. The pink cabanas and banana leaf–lined corridors, that green-and-white awning stretching over the red carpet porte cochere—that’s been my definition of big time silver screen Hollywood glamour since I got my first good look, in the 1990s, as a starstruck newly arrived transplant to the West Coast. To go past the velvet rope at the Pink Palace was to gain a passport to Oz.

Courtesy of Beverly Hills Historical Society

The lobby at the hotel was designed by architect Paul Revere Williams and interior designers Paul Laszlo, John Luccareni, and Harriet Shellenberger.

It was both thrilling and daunting when, six years ago, I was brought on as creative director to add the first new amenities to the hotel since the late 1940s, when the legendary Paul Revere Williams conceived that signature rosy shade, the cursive logo, and the Polo Lounge.

While these touchstones remain in the hotel’s vernacular—no one should ever touch the Fountain Coffee Room!—soon this beloved playground will have a series of drinking and dining experiences that hark back to the days when Gloria Swanson held court in the bungalows following one of her divorces and Will Rogers made his way to the property riding his horse on the bridle path that ran down the middle of Sunset Boulevard.

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Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall shooting Designing Woman by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

It was scenes like those, from a more innocent time when this was an industry town in its infancy, that I held on to during the tragic fires earlier this year that destroyed countless homes and historical landmarks, including Rogers’s own ranch house in Pacific Palisades. To me these bygone snapshots suggest a destination at the end of the yellow brick road, a moment when, after Los Angeles rebuilds with our help, it can return to its rightful place as America’s dream factory. 

This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Town & Country, with the headline “The Show Must Go On.” SUBSCRIBE NOW