In West Hollywood, where hot spots and beloved restaurants change with the direction of the wind, the Sunset Tower has done something no one in this city is supposed to be able to do: it is only getting better with time.
There is a room on the Sunset Strip that has never needed to announce itself. The Sunset Tower Bar has been the most powerful dining room in Hollywood for over two decades — and before that, the building itself was witness to everything the last century of American ambition, excess, and reinvention had to offer. John Wayne kept a cow on his penthouse balcony. Bugsy Siegel ran his operation from apartment 1E. Truman Capote, newly arrived and already sharp-tongued, wrote home in 1947 that the Tower was "where every scandal that ever happened happened." Some things don't change.
Ross and I have been regulars since the early 2000s, not long after Jeff Klein took ownership in 2004 and gave the building back its soul. Over twenty-plus years, we have sat at that bar more nights than we can count — celebrating, commiserating, closing deals, and sometimes just watching the room work, which is an education all its own. We have stayed in the townhouse and the penthouse. We were there during COVID, on the terrace, when the hotel kept its composure and its glamour while the rest of the world forgot both. And we have just returned from our first visit since the 2026 refresh — fresh linens, polished edges, the building's best version of itself in years.
This is our accounting.
A Building That Was Born Knowing Who It Was
Designed in 1929 by architect Leland Bryant, the Sunset Tower was a trendsetter from the moment it opened. Its dramatic Art Deco lines on the Sunset Strip, its proximity to the famous restaurants and nightclubs of the thirties and forties — these weren't coincidences. They were a thesis statement. Fifteen stories of chevrons, carved friezes, and faceted windows — fighter planes and zeppelins etched into the stone alongside stags and pagodas, a building already reaching toward the future while gripping the past.
Among its early residents: Howard Hughes, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Taylor, Bugsy Siegel, Truman Capote, Jean Harlow. The penthouse passed through the hands of Wayne, Hughes, and Sinatra at different points — and Hughes reportedly kept several of the lower floors for his girlfriends as well, because of course he did. The building accommodates. It always has.
By the early 1980s, after decades of mismanagement and failed condo conversion schemes, the Tower had deteriorated to what one account called "something from a war-ravaged land." It was nearly torn down. Saved by its 1980 placement on the National Register of Historic Places, it passed through several owners and names — the St. James's Club, The Argyle — before Jeff Klein arrived in 2004 and finished the job. He paid a reported $20 million for what he described bluntly as "run-down, tacky, fake Deco." He hired designer Paul Fortune, stripped out the imposters, and let the building be itself again.
The restraint is the whole point. The Sunset Tower doesn't cosplay as a historic property. It is one.
"The Sunset Tower doesn't need to declare itself hip. Its grand history speaks for itself — and has been successfully carried forward to the present."
One detail that separates the Sunset Tower from every other luxury address on the Strip: the security is extraordinary — and deliberately so. From the moment you arrive, you feel it. This is a property that takes the safety and privacy of its guests as seriously as it takes its history. In a city where the right people need to know they can move freely without concern for the world outside, that sense of protection is not incidental. It is part of the experience — and part of why the most discerning guests return again and again. You are in a safe space here. The Tower ensures it.
The lobby — old Hollywood, unhurried, entirely itself
These are the steps that lead to the Tower Bar concierge — and the gatekeepers who stand here are among the most gracious in the business, as long as you have reserved properly and you are in the system. If not, you may find yourself redirected to the adjacent terrace bar, which to be fair is also extraordinary — often graced with live jazz, and a worthy destination in its own right. Inside the Tower Bar itself, most nights bring a pianist and bass player, and on occasion, a harpist. It is the kind of ambient detail you don't notice until it's gone.
The Tower Bar — and Why You Will Put Your Phone Away Willingly
A note before we begin: the Tower Bar's strict no photos, no cameras, no phone calls policy is not a footnote — it's a founding principle of what makes the room what it is. We honored it, as we always have. What follows instead is every other corner of this extraordinary property we've been privileged to experience over the years: the pool, the terrace, the accommodations, the public spaces, and the kind of details — embossed hand towels in every lavatory, poolside service that anticipates before you ask — that reveal not just a hotel, but a comfortable and consistent luxury experience that takes its obligations to its guests with the same seriousness it takes its history. The Tower Bar may be off camera. Everything else speaks for itself.
The no-phone rule is not pretension. It is architecture — social architecture, the kind that makes a room feel safe. When you cannot photograph the person across from you, something shifts. The room relaxes. People lean in. Conversations deepen. The Tower Bar has been the venue for more real Hollywood business — the kind that actually determines what gets made, who gets hired, what gets greenlit — than anywhere else in this city, precisely because everyone in it has agreed, tacitly, to exist only in the present tense. No record. No receipts. Just the room.
And yet. The room's protection is not unconditional. Over the years, certain people held court here with the confidence of those who believed the Tower's discretion was permanent — three nights a week, season after season, the kind of regularity that breeds dangerous comfort. And then, eventually, the details would surface anyway — in Deadline, in The Hollywood Reporter, in Variety — and the foyer threshold of this hallowed building would become, for those people, permanently impassable. Harvey Weinstein among them. The Tower Bar did not mourn their absence. Neither did anyone else in the room.
These walls may not talk. But they do whisper.
Dimitri — On the Sacred Art of Being Known
Before we get to the room, we have to talk about how Dimitri got here. It is 2004. Jeff Klein has just acquired the building and is deep in renovation. The restaurant is nearly ready, but he has no one to run it. He has dinner one evening with his friend Tom Ford. Klein mentions the problem. Tom Ford says nothing immediately. Then, before the evening ends, he writes a name on a coaster and slides it across the table.
The name is Dimitri Dimitrov.
Dimitri is Macedonian-born, old-world trained, and at that moment running a small, eccentric caviar house in Hollywood with four tables, a staff of twenty, and a clientele that included Tom Ford himself. Klein made the call. They met for cappuccino. The rest is history — twenty-plus years of it, now living in the walls of the Tower Bar the same way all the other history does: quietly, indelibly. Read Tom Ford and Dimitri in conversation →
We have been in that room a hundred times since Dimitri took his post, and if you want to understand what a great maître d' actually does, watch him work for one evening. He is in his navy cashmere jacket, black-rimmed glasses — someone once described him as resembling Peter Sellers, which is exactly right — with the gold Clé d'Or on his lapel, a gift from Wes Anderson. He knows who you are before you reach the door. He knows which table you prefer and why. He knows what the room needs at any given moment.
Charmed by the dapper host over the years, regulars have become genuine friends. The room is, as Jeff Klein himself has said, "a rich person's Cheers — you always know someone in the room." Dimitri is why. Read the Hollywood Reporter's profile of Dimitri →
Gabé Doppelt — The Editor Who Ran the Room
When Dimitri moved to San Vicente Bungalows — the hyperexclusive private club Klein opened a few blocks away — his replacement was, on paper, a surprise: Gabé Doppelt (pronounced "Gabbi"), a well-connected British editor who had spent decades at the top of the magazine world. Editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle. West Coast editor of W and Vogue. Bureau chief of The Daily Beast. A James Beard Award winner for food writing. She came to the Tower Bar podium having covered Hollywood for twenty years from the editorial side — and Dimitri trained her from the very bottom, starting her in the dish pit polishing silverware, telling her daily that she knew nothing, until she knew everything.
She ran the room brilliantly for five years before moving to San Vicente Bungalows to spearhead Klein's expansion — and is now in New York overseeing the Manhattan outpost. We were regulars through both eras, and we were privileged to know both of them in that room. Read the Hollywood Reporter's Tower Bar handoff feature →
The Insider's Guide to When to Go
A word of insider intelligence earned over two decades of regular visits: Tuesday through Thursday, the room belongs entirely to Hollywood's power structure. These are the nights when the real business of the industry gets done — the greenlight conversations, the quiet reshufflings, the dinners that determine what gets made and who makes it. Getting a table in the Tower Bar itself on those nights is genuinely difficult, and if you manage it, understand that you are in the right room on the right night. The adjacent room is always an option and still very much the Tower experience — but the bar room on a Tuesday is something else entirely.
Weekends are more accessible. The power brokers don't disappear — they live here, they can't resist Dimitri, they come back Saturday with their closest friends — but the room breathes a little differently, mixes more freely, and a first-timer has a better shot at a table and a real evening. Go on a weekend to fall in love with the place. Come back on a Wednesday once you've earned your regular status and see what the room actually is.
Either way: put your phone away before you walk in. You won't miss it.
The Pool & Terrace — Hollywood's Best Power Lunch with a View
As fabulous as the Tower Bar is for a Hollywood power dinner or a romantic evening, the poolside terrace deserves its own chapter. Set overlooking the sparkling pool with jetliner views stretching from downtown Los Angeles all the way to the Pacific, this is one of the great outdoor dining spaces in the city — for a power lunch, an epic weekend brunch with close friends, or simply a long afternoon in the California sun with something cold and a view that never gets old.
Patrick Raymond — poolside terrace, Sunset Tower Hotel
The Penthouse — Where Oscar Nominees Wake Up
Penthouse living room and terrace — Sunset Tower Hotel
The penthouse — the same perch that John Wayne and Howard Hughes occupied at different points, each in their own chaotic way — gives you the city in a way that nothing at ground level can. The view north and west down the Strip, the distant San Gabriel Mountains, the specific orange of a Los Angeles sunset draping itself across the basin. There are only two of these accommodations on property, and along with every other premium room, they are essentially spoken for during awards season. The Sunset Tower is on something close to lockdown during Oscar week — and has been for years. You need to be on the list. Between the Tower Bar and the hotel, the property runs at capacity as the industry descends on West Hollywood's most elite address, nominees preparing for their biggest night in rooms that have seen the same ritual play out for decades.
The penthouse bathrooms — where the view competes with the soak
The Townhouse — Your Private Residence on the Strip
Townhouse upper level overview
The townhouse living room and its extraordinary floor-to-ceiling library
The townhouse is more intimate, more residential — the kind of space that feels like living rather than staying. The floor-to-ceiling library, the bar, the dining area, the sense of a private world entirely your own above one of the most storied streets on earth. We have spent long weekends here and never wanted to leave.
The townhouse bar and dining area · Old Hollywood photography throughout
The Deluxe King Suite — More Than a Deluxe View
Deluxe King Suite · Sunset Tower Hotel
Floor-to-ceiling curved bay windows. The Art Deco geometry of the building's exterior framing your view of the Strip. The cream and gold palette warm against the Los Angeles light. Open the windows and feel the dry California cross-breeze. It is a room that knows what it is — and so, after a visit or two, will you.
The Details — Why Regulars Come Back
The chocolate tower upon arrival · Homemade cookies — made to order, piping hot, for every guest
This is where the Sunset Tower separates itself not just from luxury hotels, but from great ones. Arrive as a returning guest and you will find a chocolate tower in your room — shaped like the building, your name written in chocolate, a welcome back that is entirely personal. The turndown service leaves homemade cookies instead of a mint — made to order and piping hot, available to Tower Bar guests as well. These are not amenities. They are gestures. The distinction matters.
Signature bath products · Embossed plush hand towels in every lavatory on property
His and her amenities — the kind of detail you remember
Sunset Tower Hotel · Day & Night · 8358 Sunset Boulevard · West Hollywood
These walls may not talk. But they do whisper. Treat the room well, treat the people around you with respect, and you may find yourself with something far more valuable than a good table — a good friend or two you can count on, and a place that welcomes you back time and again.
To Dimitri and Gabé: thank you. What has now been decades of great meet-ups, good times, and incredible celebrations. You are, and have always been, the dynamic duo.
Sunset Tower Hotel · West Hollywood, California · 2026
Reviewed by Patrick Raymond · 45+ Years of Travel · 60+ Countries
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