Beverly Hills & Rodeo Drive

Beverly Hills is the most famous wealthy neighbourhood in the world — an independent city (technically not part of LA) of manicured lawns, palm-lined streets, and the kind of concentrated luxury that has defined American aspirational culture since Hollywood's golden age. Rodeo Drive, the three-block shopping street between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, is the epicentre — a corridor of Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Tiffany that caters to a clientele that arrives in chauffeured vehicles and treats shopping as a performing art.

The architecture of Rodeo Drive and the surrounding blocks is surprisingly varied — from the Via Rodeo (a faux-European cobblestone shopping lane built in 1990 that recreates a Roman streetscape with California sunshine) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced Anderton Court (1953) to the modernist Beverly Wilshire hotel (the 'Pretty Woman' hotel) that anchors the bottom of the drive. The residential streets north of Sunset Boulevard — where the houses of celebrities past and present hide behind hedges and security gates — provide the architecture-as-fantasy that Beverly Hills sells to the world.

The Beverly Hills Hotel ('The Pink Palace'), operating since 1912 on Sunset Boulevard, is the neighbourhood's most iconic building — a pink stucco Spanish Colonial Revival hotel whose Polo Lounge has been the entertainment industry's unofficial boardroom for a century. Non-guests can visit the lobby, the pool (via the Cabana Café), and the Polo Lounge for drinks, which provides access to a piece of Hollywood mythology without requiring a room reservation.