Where to Stay in Beverly Hills, California

What is Beverly Hills known for?

Rodeo Drive and its designer boutiques sit in Downtown Beverly Hills, the Golden Triangle. The city's hotels carry fame of their own, the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire Hotel above all. Film stars have built houses in Beverly Hills since Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford raised Pickfair on Summit Drive.

Pickfair was finished in 1921.

What are the main landmarks in Beverly Hills?

Greystone Mansion is Beverly Hills' own landmark. The oilman Edward L. Doheny finished it in 1928 as a 55-room house for his son; it belongs to Beverly Hills and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Beverly Hills Hotel, finished in 1912, and the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, opened in 1928, are its famous hotels.

Beverly Gardens runs the length of Santa Monica Boulevard through the city, with the Electric Fountain at its corner with Wilshire Boulevard. The Virginia Robinson Gardens, a Beaux-Arts estate by Nathaniel Dryden, and the Harold Lloyd Estate, in Spanish Colonial Revival style, are both on the National Register of Historic Places.

What is the history of Beverly Hills?

The Tongva lived on the land of Beverly Hills first. Gaspar de Portolá passed through on August 3, 1769, along native trails on the line of Wilshire Boulevard, and in 1828 María Rita Quinteros de Valdez and her husband settled the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. Farmers later grew lima beans on the Hammel and Denker Ranch.

In 1900 the Amalgamated Oil Company bought the ranch and found too little oil to work, so in 1906 its owners reorganised as the Rodeo Land and Water Company, named the property Beverly Hills after Beverly Farms in Massachusetts and the hills around it, and began selling lots. The Beverly Hills Hotel, finished in 1912, drew buyers. The city incorporated in 1914.

Film stars followed Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and in 1923 they helped defeat a plan to annex the city to Los Angeles. The early lots carried covenants that barred non-white and Jewish buyers; in the 1940s Hattie McDaniel and other Black actors defended their homes in court, and the Supreme Court declared such covenants unenforceable in 1948. After the 1979 revolution in Iran many Persian Jews settled in Beverly Hills.

Where is Beverly Hills?

Beverly Hills lies in Los Angeles County, California, southwest of the Hollywood Hills and about 19.6 kilometres northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles surrounds it, together with West Hollywood. Bel Air and the Santa Monica Mountains border it on the northwest, West Hollywood and the Fairfax District on the east, and Beverlywood on the south.

It covers about 14.8 square kilometres of land. With Bel Air and Holmby Hills, it forms the Platinum Triangle.