Hotels have long been fantasy fodder for do-it-yourself designers. Just as Kelly Wearstler's Viceroy and Maison 140 hotels goosed the Hollywood Regency trend, the look of three new local lodgings can lend similar inspiration to Southern California homes. "There's an emerging backlash against nightclub-inspired interiors and a move toward a more authentic and comfortable residential feeling," says David Collins, who transformed the Bel Age on Sunset Boulevard into the London West Hollywood. Here's a look at how designers have exuded a strong sense of place in very different ways.

CUSTOM HOTEL

Architect Welton Becket, whose firm built the Capitol Records building, designed this 1960s tower near Los Angeles International Airport. Developer Avi Brosh recently reimagined it as a loft-style business hotel whose exposed concrete columns, burnished cinder-block walls and Cementi floor tiles have an industrial feel. The lobby is warmed up with cork stools designed by Jasper Morrison for Moooi and woolly sheep sculptures from Moss with wooden legs and leather ears.

"They have been kidnapped and found all over the hotel," an amused desk clerk says. "But they always find their way home in the morning."

One coffee table sports a photo- engraved concrete top with the image of Becket, an effect that can be duplicated by Texas-based Intaglio Composites for a price. (The Custom's cost $7,760.) An easier look to emulate: artists' flat filing cabinets used as coffee tables, balanced by upholstered sectionals with purple and pink pillows.

Brosh also deployed elements of what he calls "grandma chic" -- rugs with a crochet appearance and embroidered floral cushions on contemporary Nais wire chairs designed by Alfredo Häberli -- to give a "comforting" feel to the spare space.

Whimsy rules. A conference room floor is covered in a grass print from the ASI Vinyl Imagination Series purchased from Architectural Systems Inc. To accentuate the faux pasture, Brosh placed a KS Cow cabinet bought for about $1,000 at Espacio Home in London (pictured on Page 1). The look can be replicated by creating a large-scale image at a copy shop and cutting it to fit flat drawer fronts.

Largely serving travelers on business or layovers, Brosh wanted surprising rooms that were "uplifting, light, uncluttered and very easy to use." Many of his solutions can work in guest rooms and kids' quarters. What makes the platform beds memorable is a single design move: a Kravet dog pattern for draperies that Brosh had printed on softer fabric and sewn into coverlets by SK Textile in L.A.

"Some of the best design evolves when you have restrictions," Brosh says of the rooms, which are devoid of paintings or fussy curtains. "We were restrained in color and art and bold in layout and concept." Indeed, the finishing touch on his "best-in-show" rooms is a blue ribbon clipped onto a plain white lamp shade.

PALIHOUSE HOLLOWAY

Created as an alternative to cookie-cutter corporate extended-stay hotels, Palihouse Holloway in West Hollywood makes a design statement starting in the lobby, which designer Avi Brosh says is evocative of New York bars and French bistros.

"It's residential European living rooms meets East Coast prep school student unions," he says, but filtered through a Los Angeles lens of midcentury modernism.

Guest quarters have Saarinen tables and Bertoia bar stools mixed with other classics, including Chesterfield sofas and Union Jack pillows. The lobby is an even more ambitious mash-up of periods, places and styles.

Custom-patterned cement tiles, available from Creative Environments Inc. at the Pacific Design Center, were made in Mexico.

"I like the imperfect quality of these tiles, which gives the space an old existing feeling as opposed to a new polished feel," Brosh says.

To create the atmosphere of a dining room, Brosh surrounded a refectory-style table with bentwood fan-back chairs reminiscent of Thonet's -- pieces he found for $200 each at London-based Andy Thornton.

Elsewhere, Brosh created smaller bistro tables with 24-inch-diameter marble tops, purchased for $56 each from restaurant and bar supplier Beaufurn in North Carolina.

The marble was set on metal bases ordered from Central Restaurant Products .com/ in Indiana and paired with vintage wooden chairs found at the Venice store Obsolete.

On one lobby wall, Brosh created a montage of magazine clippings and other found objects pinned to bulletin board cork, available by the roll and applied with contact cement. A scenic artist for films gave the wall treatment a brocade pattern hand-stamped in metallic colors.

"There are several specialized paints and stencils at Mann Brothers on La Brea that anyone could use," Brosh says.