Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Kimpton (www.kimptonhotels.com)
Kimpton is the plushest of the San Francisco boutique hotel brands, but,
largely because its hotels are in older buildings with smaller rooms, it's still
a step below luxury. This brand has expanded to open properties around
North America, but San Francisco is still its base, and there are nine merry,
fresh-faced, well-designed hotels in town (on discount sites often priced
$150-$180) from which to choose. I especially enjoy the lavishly over-the-
top, circus-like decor of
Hotel Monaco San Francisco
555
(501 Geary
St., at Taylor;
%
866/622-5284 or 415/292-0100; from $223),
where
doormen look like they've just jumped off the running boards of Capone's
vehicle after a hit, and where rooms are decorated with oddities such as
live goldfish and 7-foot circular mirrors. Also swell are the
Sir Francis
Drake
55
(450 Powell St., between Post and Sutter;
%
800/795-7129
or 415/392-7755; from $167, which is darn good for a room with a view),
a 1920s palace that towers over the north of Union Square; and the
Argonaut Hotel
5
(495 Jefferson St., at Hyde;
%
866/415-0704 or 415/
563-0800; from $174),
which occupies a historic warehouse overlooking
the Powell-Hyde cable-car turntable at Fisherman's Wharf—the most
expensive rooms have dreamy bay views. The most reasonable of the
Kimptons is the
Hotel Triton
5
(342 Grant Ave., at Bush;
%
800/800-
1299 or 415/394-0500),
right at the gates to Chinatown, which prides
itself on eco-friendly quarters (water-saving bathrooms, lots of recycling),
for which it charges from $139—a lot less than the nearby Orchard Garden
Hotel, a non-Kimpton hotel that sells itself as green, too. And that price
does
fit into this guide quite nicely.
a shared bathroom ($95, versus $150 for a private bath), you'll face the back. The
owners, John and Renate Kenaston, clearly put love into their enterprise, and they
get a lot of repeat business for their pains.
$$-$$$
The 166-room
Mosser Hotel
55
(54 4th St., at Market;
%
800/
227-3804 or 415/986-4400; www.themosser.com; AE, MC, V),
built in 1913 but
renovated in lots of gray and graphite tones recently, has one of the best locations
of any hotel in the city: right off Market Street and within a few steps of most of
the major shopping, yet still in a neighborhood you wouldn't mind being in at
night. Prices for a shared-bath room ($109) are a good deal, although $189 for a
private-bath room is not competitive with other hotels of this level. Rooms have
lots of high-design features (nice flat-screen TVs), but because human beings are
still low-tech they might find some of them a bit annoying—the TV and Internet
($8/day) are unnecessarily complicated, the newfangled light switches don't
always respond, and the flip-top garbage cans in each room look like tables and
tend to swallow up little things when you forget and place them there. The show-
ers, too, are weaker than I'd like. But these seem like small quibbles for such a
