Every city keeps one hotel as its memory, and San Francisco keeps the Fairmont. Opened in 1907 on the crown of Nob Hill, a year after the earthquake that nearly finished it before it started, the hotel has put up presidents for over a century, and Tony Bennett sang ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ in public for the first time in its Venetian Room. The lobby remains one of the great American hotel spaces: Corinthian columns, acres of marble and a steady churn of weddings, conventions and visitors who climbed the hill just to look at it.
The 606 rooms split between the historic main building and the 1961 tower. Main-building rooms carry the period detail, high ceilings and satisfyingly thick walls; tower rooms are plainer but own the postcard, and from the upper floors the sweep of bay, bridge and Alcatraz justifies the category jump. Marble bathrooms are standard, and Fairmont Gold buys a quiet club floor with its own concierge and an evening spread that can stand in for dinner.
Laurel Court handles breakfast and a properly executed afternoon tea, but the institution is the Tonga Room, the 1945 tiki bar where the band plays from a barge floating on the old swimming pool and an artificial thunderstorm rolls through every half hour. It is ridiculous and we would not change a thing. Be clear-eyed about the rest: Nob Hill goes quiet at night, summer fog is a fact, and rack rates lean hard on the history. Then a cable car rattles up California Street towards the front door and the maths resolves itself.
