20 Historic Hotels That Invented Modern Luxury Before Resorts Existed

César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier who had run the Savoy Hotel in London, opened his own hotel on Paris’s Place Vendôme on June 1, 1898, in a converted 18th-century townhouse. He ensured every room had its own bathroom, telephone, and electricity, requirements that no major European hotel had demanded until then. He also recruited chef Auguste Escoffier, who had also worked at the Savoy. The hotel’s name would become the English-language word “ritzy.”

The Taj Mahal Palace in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, was opened on December 16, 1903, by Indian industrialist Jamsetji Tata, founder of the Tata Group. The palace incorporated Moorish, Florentine, and Indian architectural styles. It was the first building in the city with electric lighting and the first to have electric lifts. According to popular belief, Tata had been turned away from a whites-only hotel, prompting him to build his own hotel. However, historians now believe he wanted to develop the city’s economy.

New York’s original Waldorf-Astoria, built by rival branches of the Astor family, was demolished to build the Empire State Building. It reopened on Park Avenue on October 1, 1931, as an Art Deco skyscraper, and became the first upscale hotel to promote 24-hour room service as a feature. The hotel’s longtime maître d’, Oscar Tschirky, created the Waldorf Salad there, and it shares disputed status with another establishment as the birthplace of Eggs Benedict.

In Tokyo, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan Revival design for the main building of the Imperial Hotel sat on cantilevered floors and a floating foundation. The hotel opened on September 1, 1923, the same day the Great Kantō earthquake hit. Other buildings nearby collapsed, but the Wright-designed hotel merely settled a bit and had some broken pipes. After decades of ground subsidence, it was finally dismantled in 1967. Its legendary lobby was rebuilt at an open-air museum far from Tokyo.

In 1904, John Jacob Astor IV, an American real estate magnate, opened the St. Regis in New York as Manhattan’s tallest luxury hotel. He introduced a dedicated butler system for guests, copying the custom of grand private estates. Astor died aboard the Titanic eight years later, in 1912. Decades after that, a bartender at the hotel’s King Cole Bar created what we now call the Bloody Mary.

In 1912, two years before Beverly Hills was established as a municipality, Margaret Anderson and her son, Stanley, opened the Beverly Hills Hotel in what were then rural bean fields. Built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style with private garden bungalows, the property became a secret getaway for stars including Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. It didn’t acquire its iconic pink hue until 1948, 36 years later.

A Romanian-born hotel manager named Henri Negresco opened the Hotel Negresco in Nice on January 4, 1913, intended as a destination for European nobility. The salon with a glass ceiling still features a chandelier of more than 16,000 crystals, originally commissioned by Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Negresco lost ownership of the hotel during the financial tumult of World War I. Unverified local legend claims the dome was shaped after the bra of engineer Gustave Eiffel’s mistress, though historians treat this as folklore rather than fact.

William Ralston, one of the founders of the Bank of California, bankrolled construction of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The hotel, a monument to hydraulic elevators and a glass-roofed carriage court, was the largest luxury hotel in the American West when it opened in 1875, run by Ralston’s business partner. Ralston himself had drowned on August 27, 1875, just five weeks before the opening. The building burned following the 1906 earthquake, but was reconstructed and reopened in 1909 with its Garden Court at its center, and flourished for many years thereafter.

The original, smaller Plaza Hotel opened on Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, but both were called the Plaza. The current building, designed by architect Henry Hardenbergh and managed by Fred Sterry, opened its doors in 1907 as a replacement. The new version was designed in the style of a French chateau and cost roughly $12.5 million. With gilded plasterwork and crystal chandeliers, it soon became a popular gathering place for the rich and famous in New York, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

On August 6, 1889, Richard D’Oyly Carte, the theater impresario who had become rich producing Gilbert and Sullivan operas, opened the Savoy on London’s Strand. It was Britain’s first luxury hotel built specifically as one. It had electric light and passenger lifts, and all of its en-suite bathrooms provided constant hot and cold water. Eight months later, Carte employed hotel manager César Ritz and chef Auguste Escoffier to run the establishment. They quickly transformed the dining room into a hotspot for London’s elite.

William and Marianne Claridge opened the first Claridge’s in the 1850s. It was later rebuilt by producer and Savoy builder Richard D’Oyly Carte. It later received an Art Deco redesign. During World War II, the hotel housed several exiled kings and queens of Europe. Dubbed “the annex to Buckingham Palace,” Claridge’s allegedly became part of Yugoslavia in 1945 when the United Kingdom symbolically transferred one of its rooms to Yugoslav territory so a prince-in-exile could be born on his homeland’s soil.

Elisha Babcock Jr. and H.L. Story, two California developers, opened Hotel del Coronado, near San Diego, in February 1888. Built entirely from Oregon pine and redwood, it was the largest wooden resort hotel in the world at the time. It was one of the first major hotels to be wired for central electric lighting. The installation was handled by Thomas Edison’s electric company, and not by Edison himself. It was visited by several U.S. presidents and featured prominently in the 1959 film Some Like It Hot.

The Egyptian ruler Khedive Ismail Pasha built a private hunting lodge at the base of the Pyramids of Giza in 1869. It was purchased and enlarged by an English couple, Ethel and Hugh Locke-King, who opened it to the public in 1886 as a luxury hotel. The hotel was known for its hand-carved mashrabiya woodwork and fine brasswork. It also added Egypt’s first hotel swimming pool in 1890.

Pera Palace is the first hotel built in the Ottoman Empire to feature electricity and central hot running water. It was built in 1895 by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the company that runs the Orient Express line, to house passengers arriving from Paris. The Pera Palace has one of Europe’s first hotel elevators, and one of its most famous. According to popular legend, it was here that Agatha Christie penned Murder on the Orient Express in room 411. The hotel was designed by architect Alexander Vallaury.

The Grand Hotel Tremezzo, on Lake Como, was opened by Enea and Maria Gandola on July 10, 1910. An Art Nouveau luxury resort with private gardens overlooking Bellagio, it has been a favorite of European aristocracy and movie stars such as Greta Garbo, who mentioned it in the 1932 film Grand Hotel. The iconic floating pool wasn’t part of the original design. It was built in the 1990s.

People have been bathing in the waters of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, since 1778, but it was the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway that constructed the Greenbrier’s monumental Georgian mansion, complete with championship golf courses when it opened in 1913. In 1948, interior decorator Dorothy Draper remodeled the guest rooms in her signature bold florals, which can still be found throughout the hotel. A secret Cold War bunker for Congressmen, built in 1958, remained hidden under the property for decades.

On December 1, 1887, four Armenian brothers, the Sarkies, opened Raffles Hotel in Singapore and grew it from a ten-roomed beach bungalow into Southeast Asia’s most celebrated grand hotel, with teak architecture and tropical gardens. Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham were among the guests who stayed there. Around 1915, a bartender called Ngiam Tong Boon invented the Singapore Sling at its Long Bar.

The French monarch, King Louis XV, ordered the construction of a building on the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1758 for use as a mansion by the dukes of Crillon. The property remained a private residence for about 150 years before it opened as the Hôtel de Crillon on March 11, 1909, after restoration. Ten years later, US President Woodrow Wilson and Allied leaders drafted the founding Covenant of the League of Nations in its salons.

In 1958, Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry’s Bar and creator of the Bellini, opened the Hotel Cipriani on Giudecca Island with money from Guinness family heiresses. With its Murano chandeliers, Fortuny textiles, and Venice’s only heated seawater swimming pool, the hotel was just a five-minute boat trip from St. Mark’s Square, a retreat for movie stars and royalty away from the tourist crowds.

English hotelier Samuel Shepheard opened his Cairo hotel in 1841, before there even was a Suez Canal. It quickly became the preferred stopover for European visitors and diplomats on their way to India and East Africa, famous for its open-air terrace and orientalist grandeur. The original Victorian edifice stood for over a century, until January 26, 1952, when it burned down in the Cairo Fire riots. Another, more modern hotel was built further downriver in 1957, but Shepheard’s itself was never rebuilt.

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