At Beverly Hills Hotel, Luxury Makes Up for the Lack of Taste

The Pink Palace is definitely very pink, but it isn’t much of a palace. The Beverly Hills Hotel presides over its namesake city, but discreetly and coyly. It isn’t even remarkable until you get inside one of its grander bungalows.

What is remarkable is that such a basically mediocre building, hidden behind layers of shrubs and drowned in pink and green, has become such a popular and successful landmark. It is devoid of any great public spaces and has been added onto until it has become a collection of every decorator style in town. It succeeds because it plays the Beverly Hills game to the hilt (it may even have invented it): It houses showy displays within a landscape of exclusivity, and it makes up in sheer luxury what it lacks in traditional taste.

When Burton Green built the Pink Palace in 1912, he meant it to be the crown jewel of his speculative land development, Beverly Hills. Placed on 12 acres of a knoll at the convergence of Sunset Boulevard and the gently curving streets he had laid out, it would be a magnet for Easterners (and potential home buyers), luring them to the rural charms of Southern California.

Within two decades, the transformation of the area into a bedroom community for “the industry” made the hotel into something else altogether; a hitching post for the rich and famous, a place of self-conscious splendor discreetly hidden by ever-denser layers of banana plants and bougainvilleas.

Except for a period during the Depression when it actually went bankrupt, the hotel has never closed. But there are plans to close it for two years for a complete renovation. No doubt it will emerge as an even more luxurious, perhaps more tastefully decorated, and certainly more visible landmark. Its rooms will be enlarged and redone, and the screened parking lot out front will be replaced by a rolling green lawn and fountains.

Therefore, time is running out to enjoy the peculiar charms of the now-almost-hidden hotel, a glorious exercise in questionable taste that is so outrageous as to be thoroughly enjoyable.

The hotel defies the rules of good design--from the fire stairs that are the most visible part of the Mission-style original West Wing to the strangely New Orleans-style balconies that adorn the 1950s East Wing; from the green and white striped porte cochere to the dripping floral pilasters inside the cramped lobby; from the Neo-Classical colonnades of the ballroom to the undefinable power chic of the Polo Lounge.

Add to this collection of 80 years of architectural and decorating curiosities an organization that exploits the relatively steep and cramped site, creating a maze of levels, wings, pavilions and walkways. It is an environment where you are continually surprised by the sheer excess of colors, vegetation and amenities.

Then there are the fabled bungalows, stucco versions of the standard Beverly Hills home grouped together into an almost Disneyland-like version of the flats just beyond the grounds.

The Beverly Hills Hotel works because it is like an ancestral home owned by a wealthy great aunt who keeps redoing the place with her friends. It doesn’t add up, but it sure works for the rich and famous. Let’s just hope the designers of the renovation understand the discreet charms of this haute bourgeois dowager and don’t try to turn her into a self-conscious version of one of her many rational, well-designed and pompous imitators.