Chateau Marmont - Hollywood's Celebrity Hideout Hotel

Chateau Marmont Hotel in West Hollywood will unfortunately always be remembered as the place where Saturday Night Live comedian John Belushi died of an overdose. Fortunately, Chateau Marmont is also known as a lush hideaway for the rich and famous in the middle of the lively and legendary Sunset Strip.

Schwab's Drugstore, the Brown Derby restaurant, the Trocadero and Mocambo nightclubs are all gone. Chateau Marmont Hotel is one of the few survivors of Hollywood's golden age in the 1930s. Actually Chateau is still a cutting edge place for the rich and famous, thanks to boutique hotelier Other Belazs acquire the property in 1991. Fortunately, he renovated hotel without losing its historic beauty and character. He upgraded its services by actually adding the room service (yes, Chateau Marmont never had room service) and a small restaurant specializing in "French-California cuisine." 

When the Chateau Marmont was built in 1927, it was conceived as an upscale apartment building, modeled after the Chateau d'Ambroise, a chateau in France's Loire Valley, where Leonardo DaVinci spent the last three years of his life. Back in the thirties, Chateau Marmont only became a hotel because the high rents could not draw enough residents during the Depression.

Since the Chateau Marmont was originally built as apartments, this has worked to its advantage because each room has the homey feel of an apartment in contrast to the sterile feel of a typical hotel room. Another advantage: the building's structure, unique for its time, was designed to be earthquake safe, and it actually survived five major Southern California earthquakes, including the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake. These characteristics, combined with his adventures in Hollywood glory and debauchery, Chateau Marmont is a home away from home for so many celebrities who check in for several months at a time.

According to hotel's own press release, the Chateau Marmont the kind of place where you can avoid your room for weeks and nobody will think anything of it. "Chateau's physical layout is ideal for privacy, its inhabitants are able to skirt around all public places 

on their way to their cars. And there are "green" views on all sides, successfully muffling the fact of the hotel's proximity to the Sunset Strip.

The actor Robert DeNiro lived at the Château in two years. Boris Karloff lived here for five years. In the fifties, Occupied billionaire Howard Hughes in the penthouse, brings a number of mistresses here. In the forties, advised Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn his hard partying male stars like William Holden and Glenn Ford, "If you want to get into trouble, do it at Chateau Marmont."

Director Oliver Stone shot part of "The Doors" movie at the Chateau, reintroduce Jim Morrison's tumble off the roof of his bungalow. Members of rock group Led Zeppelin once rode their motorcycles through lsobby. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" here. James Dean crawled through the window of director Nicholas Ray's suite to audition for "Rebel Without a Cause." 

The hotel consists of fifty rooms and suites, four bungalows and nine cabins. Room Rates start at $ 199 a night for a single room.