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In fairy-tale style, you enter the property by crossing a tiny bridge suspended over a lake that is populated by snow-white swans, the hotel’s mascots. There’s no question that this Spanish Colonial–style hotel has a lock on romance. Its ninety-one rooms are tucked behind perfectly maintained meandering paths, pots bursting with flowering plants, fountains, subtropical and native California plantings (all labeled) and an herb garden. Although it feels utterly secluded in its location on the Westside’s posh Stone Canyon Road, the hotel is actually just one mile west of Beverly Hills’ hustle and bustle.

While it was built in 1922 by Alphonzo Bell Sr. as the sales office for his new Bel-Air Estates subdivisions, it’s been thriving as a hotel for more than sixty years. There isn’t a lovelier place to drape yourself on a chaise than next to the elegant oval swimming pool, once the site of a horseback-riding ring. The tree-shaded terrace off the slightly stuffy dining room is one of the most beautiful breakfast and lunch spots in town and a favorite of Nancy Reagan and others who live in the neighborhood. Indeed, you can order Nancy Reagan’s Finely Chopped Special Cobb Salad—or a Spa Cobb with no-fat Thousand Island dressing, which isn’t on the menu. Even if you don’t stay here, be sure to have a drink in the handsome, cozy bar, which is strewn with butterscotch leather chairs, velvet banquettes, paintings of swans and Ellsworth Kelly lithographs. There’s also a piano player every evening. The Bel-Air lacks a spa (construction on one will start in the fall), and as gyms go, the Fitness Cottage (a former bungalow once favored by Marilyn Monroe) is rather uninspiring. Most rooms are decorated in the standard French hotel look—floral bedcovers, canopies, flat-screens inside armoires—but frankly, it’s the garden views that are on the money. Only half the bathrooms have been updated with marble; the rest are on the tired side, many with separate tubs and showers covered with curtains. Rooms from $395.