A breath of fresh air: Why the legendary Hotel Bel-Air is a restorative hideout like no other

I’ve only missed a flight once. Let me defend myself: I was heading back home to Toronto, after a sojourn at the Hotel Bel-Air. I had been enjoying myself intensely, feasting on quiet and sunshine, reclining on a terry-swaddled lounger by the oval-shaped pool. (Former owner Joseph Drown had transformed what was once an equestrian riding ring so Lauren Bacall, a Bel-Air habitué, could do her morning laps).

Afternoon light filtered through palm fronds and pink silk-floss trees, as little clouds white as the hotel’s gardenias glided through the sky — its limpid shade reminded me of the blue chiffon dress Grace Kelly wore in To Catch a Thief. (The allusion is not as far-fetched as it might seem: Kelly was such a frequent guest, a suite is named after her.)

I was so drunk on the scene, I somehow felt inoculated against reality, with its traffic and airport-security lines, and was (literally) unmoved to leave. And so, I didn’t — at least not at a sensible time. Checking out of this hotel feels wrong, unnatural, like forcing yourself awake from a delightful dream. (I should add here that the woman at the Air Canada counter at LAX felt similarly unmoved by my explanation.)

I have visited the Hotel Bel-Air a handful of times over the past 15 years or so. Once for work (the most delightful, and long-ago, kind), once with my husband after we got married at San Francisco’s City Hall and made the coastal drive down California’s Highway 1. And once, most recently, while grieving a devastating personal loss — I was desperate for light and softness and any relief from my sorrow. I mention the pain here only to say that the Bel-Air is the kind of place you come to try and recover from the irrecoverable. There is something so restorative about the place — its consoling stillness, its fizzing goldenness, the luxuriance of its ever-thriving gardens, and its self-protective setting at the foot of a canyon.

A year of rolling lockdowns and kindergarten Zoom school with my now six-year-old does not offer much in the way of, um, repose, or the sumptuousness of solitude. So, I have settled on what seem like memory snacks — escaping into past moments of calm. A wonderful friend, whom I have not seen in 3D for over a year, emailed recently to say she wished she had more of me in her life. A lovely thing to say, which made me realize: I want less of myself in my life.

And this is part of the pleasure of travelling — it delivers us from our regular selves, giving us the privilege of changing out the backdrop, casting, set dressing and costuming of our lives, affording us to try on other selves, to escape our lives, our spouses, our children, our homes, so that we might enjoy the luxury of missing them.

And no hotel, it seems to me, lavishes its guests with that sense of remove quite like the Hotel Bel-Air. Since it opened in 1946, the place — celebrating its 75th birthday this year — has built its now legendary reputation as a hideout. As it turns out, it’s a hotel built for lockdown. It’s a public place devised for privacy.

Celebrities have long checked in here to self-distance, as it were, to buffer themselves against the rigours of fame, to be left alone — and left with exceptional room service. On my various visits to the Bel-Air over the years, I glimpsed the late Lauren Bacall sitting under an umbrella by the pool once fashioned for her, Steven Spielberg hosting a birthday party in the restaurant, Meg Ryan and John Mellencamp lunching near the lemon trees and Lauren Hutton standing in the lobby, a sweater slung over her immaculate white button-down.

What was amazing was not seeing these people, but seeing the staff’s reaction to them — which is to say their skilled non-reactions. Nobody makes a fuss. Promenading the pathways here feels like wandering around some sitcom version of heaven: Everyone is dressed in linens or cotton poplins as white as the hotel’s resident swans, too blissed out for excitability (there are no peaks or valleys of emotion in heaven, just profound contentment and fabulous weather). Everybody — reception, pool boys, housekeeping, gardeners — exhibits the kind of talent for discretion and impassivity I’ve only ever seen in a psychiatrist. Staff training here is basically MI6-level.

The wait staff, in particular, display an almost bionic unflappability. I remember one magical morning (this, by the way, may be the only place with the power to make me love mornings), sitting amidst the bougainvillea and hummingbirds at the hotel’s outdoor restaurant, I overheard a woman at the next table order an apple juice for her young son.

“Is the apple juice fresh-pressed?” she inquired. The waitress, without hesitation, replied: “We’d be happy to press the apples,” adding, “Would you prefer Fuji or Pink Lady?” She then scurried away at a swift clip, looking like she might well be legging it to the nearest orchard to hand-pick the desired varietal. If I have so often dreamed of pre- and post-pandemic freedom, I also now dream of lockdown — at the Hotel Bel-Air.

This fantasy makes me think of the essay “Do Not Disturb” by novelist Ann Patchett, published in Gourmet magazine in 2006, about the week she spent holed up at the hotel to write. She explains what inspired her impulse to check in, the houseguest fatigue that now feels strangely dated — a BTP (Before Times Problem): “…all those splendid guests who come for dinner, and then come back to stay for long visits (because they love you, because you love them) had turned my life into an overpopulated Russian novel. Sometimes it is the wonderful life, the life of abundant friends and extended family and true love, that makes you want to run screaming for the hills.”

She ran instead for the seclusion only the Hotel Bel-Air can muster. (It turns out that a life of non-abundant friends and zero house guests can also make you want to run for the hills.) Patchett reminisces about watching a waiter ferry around the bread basket in the restaurant, how untouched that linen-swaddled bread was, secluded in its own little basket house. “The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud,” she wrote. I, too, saw the man with the bread basket, and wondered if anybody on Earth had ever endured more rejection — his spoils repeatedly dismissed with a wave of tanned, manicured hands. Today, it seems to me, we are all that linen-swaddled carb — lonely in our baskets, or bubbles, as it were.

But despite this surfeit of seclusion, I would now love nothing more than to check into the Hotel Bel-Air to convalesce from quarantine, to self-isolate from a year of enforced isolation. I wouldn’t work there as Patchett did (I’m too lazy). I would read there.

Some of what I miss most about travelling, I now realize, is reading in a hotel. It sometimes felt wrong to me, almost too rich an indulgence, like buttering a piece of cake — travelling to see the world only to escape it anew through a book. But that double layer of remove — the extravagance of this — has never seemed more alluring. I already look forward to missing my flight home.

The Star understands the restrictions on travel during the coronavirus pandemic. But like you, we dream of travelling again, and we’re publishing this story with future trips in mind.