Hotel Rex

Hotel description

Those who aren’t fans of the 1930s detective stories may be unaware that San Francisco is the original hardboiled town. San Francisco crime had class-dames in silk stockings offering you two hundred to knock off tiresome husbands. Well, the Hotel Rex hasn’t forgotten this city’s past. With its leather club chairs, and marble busts just heavy enough to clock someone with, the lobby is strictly Dashiell Hammett. A San Francisco native, he dreamt up your original tough guys-Sam Spade and Nick Charles-and was a hard-drinking ex-detective himself. Not since the Maltese Falcon have you felt such an urge to don a fedora.

In contrast to many small hotels (this one is ninety-four rooms) the Rex is masculine, especially in the bedrooms. Plaid and stripes dominate the wallpaper, curtains, and bedspreads, the lampshades are hand-painted with reductive designs, and the room is framed in dark wood. No canopies or bed frills here: palm plants serve as decoration.

When Chip Conley (the man behind the rock-and-roll Phoenix hotel) first took over the neglected 1907 institution, he envisioned a literary hotel similar to the 1920s Algonquin. The lobby is stuffed with books and 1930s art, quotes from Steinbeck and Hammett line the corridors, and the bar is called the Vicious Circle (an Algonquin reference). The San Francisco literary scene converges here frequently to do readings.

The Rex has much charm. It represents a bold, blocky, stylized world-and staying there might make you dream in black and white. When you consider the shorts, sandals, and cell phones that define San Francisco today, it’s strange to think that once upon a time, this was a place of hard Scotch, cigarette smoke, and loaded Colts. Except, perhaps, if you stay up until dawn and watch the city fog roll menacingly in.