Review of Hotel del Coronado, by Dea Birkett

Think Southern California, and you think surfers, seedy motels, and gas-guzzling cars. But just outside San Diego, on the Coronado peninsula, a legend of a hotel defies every cheap Californian cliché. Hotel Del Coronado was built 112 years ago, with Thomas Edison helping to install the new lighting system known as electricity. It oozes dated opulence, as if Charlie Chaplin might be found on the tennis courts and Greta Garbo slip out of the pool. Both are past guests.

Stepping into Hotel Del, as it's affectionately known, is entering a fantastical, filmic world. In the 1920s, L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz in one of the rooms, and is said to have modelled the Emerald City on what he saw from his window. It certainly looks like it. The hotel's mighty fanciful white wooden structure with huge red-tiled turrets has seduced many a Hollywood director.

In 1958 the most famous romantic comedy of all time, Some Like it Hot, was filmed here. There are still regular reunions of the remaining cast, and the bell boy tells tales of Tony Curtis going down in the bird cage lift with one woman and up with another. The Beach House, where Monroe stayed, can be rented for USD 2300 a night.

If there were a hotel scale for sex appeal, Hotel Del would rate as 'Scorching'. How can sleeping in the same room as Curtis or Monroe not warm even the coldest bed? Awaking to the sound of the Pacific surf helps, too. Even though there's not a surfer in sight.