Los Angeles

Los Angeles is not one place and a guide that pretends otherwise is not useful. The surf coast specifically — from Point Dume in Malibu south through Zuma, El Pescador, First Point, all the way down through Santa Monica and Venice to El Porto — is a distinct geography with its own logic, its own culture, and its own hotel inventory that has recently become worth writing about. Malibu is where the mythology lives: First Point is one of the most photographed right-hand waves on earth, and the culture around it — the Malibu Lagoon, the Colony, the relationship between the surfing families who have been here for three generations and the more recent arrivals — is specific and not easily replicated.

Santa Monica and Venice are the urban end of the coast — the Strand, the boardwalk, the yoga scene that has been operating out of studios on Main Street and Abbot Kinney since the 1990s and has produced more serious practitioners than most cities in the world. The yoga culture in Los Angeles is not the hotel-programme version — it is the real thing, built by teachers who moved here to practise and stayed to teach. Nobu Ryokan is the design proposition in Malibu — a Japanese ryokan sensibility applied to the Pacific Coast Highway, sixteen rooms, teak soaking tubs, the ocean air as the primary amenity. The collection covers the coast from Malibu to Venice because that is the coastline, and everything else is the city.