The Prospect Hollywood

Hollywood keeps most of its stars in the pavement of the Walk of Fame. Whitley Heights, on the hill above it, is where some of the real ones lived, Rudolph Valentino and Jean Harlow among them, and The Prospect stands on one of its residential streets: a white Hollywood Regency building of 1939, with 24 rooms round a garden courtyard. Martyn Lawrence Bullard redid it with the old studios in mind, taking cues for the rooms from Judy Garland, Steve McQueen and their like. Terremoto, a Los Angeles practice, designed the courtyard with native planting; it is paved in brick set with green tiles, a lion's head spouts into a stone trough, and fireplaces are built into green-tiled arches on either side. Indoors the palms are gold, two of them standing either side of the lobby bar against emerald walls and a black and white marble floor. In the rooms the ceilings are gold leaf and the palms have climbed onto the wallpaper of a Superior; in a Premier it is pagodas and parrots, round a lucite four-poster on a leopard-print carpet.

Recommended for grown-ups (nobody under 18 can check in) who would give up a pool and a restaurant for a courtyard and a bar this good-looking, and for anyone travelling with a dog under 40lb. Breakfast is fruit, coffee and pastries delivered from Farmshop, laid out from six until ten. The Hollywood Bowl, under a mile off, and Griffith Observatory, about four miles, are for the car. On foot, the Walk of Fame is five minutes away, and so is dinner, at Musso & Frank Grill, which has been serving Hollywood since 1919, twenty years before this building went up. The fires in the courtyard wait for the walk back up.