California USA

The southern half of the coast is the densest surf geography in the collection. San Diego runs from La Jolla's reefs — Windansea, Black's Beach — north to Encinitas, where Swami's peels below the Self-Realization Fellowship monastery that has watched it since 1937 and the town matured into the yoga capital of the American coast. Orange County adds Laguna Beach, an art colony since 1920, with Trestles at its southern end. Los Angeles contributes thirty miles of west-facing coast, with First Point Malibu — one of the most photographed right-hand waves on earth — at the centre of the mythology. Northwest groundswells run September through March; south swells fill the summer.

North of the surf cities the coast changes register. Big Sur's ninety miles sit under the most restricted land use plan in the United States — the Santa Lucia Mountains dropping straight into the Pacific, redwood canyons behind the cliffs, almost nothing built. Past San Francisco, Highway 1 threads the Sonoma and Mendocino bluffs to Sea Ranch, where the unpainted timber architecture of 1964 still disappears into the meadow rather than announcing itself above it. That is the California thread: the state that invented modern surf culture keeps producing the most serious coastal architecture in the country, and the hotels in this collection — across five stretches of coast — hold both ends of it.