The former homes and haunts of famous historical figures often become museums, where the thrill of stepping inside is dulled by velvet ropes. Luckily, there is a rare category of accommodations where guests can spend their days inside the very walls once inhabited by icons. Visiting such a world is both intimate and inspiring. At these five retreats, where the genius of the lives once lived inside still hums, you can gaze at the same sunsets that informed a designer’s palette, dance on a terrace that once sheltered famous lovers, or breathe garden aromas that once calmed an artist’s restless mind.
Photography by Andrew Montgomery
Villa Mabrouka
Meaning “house of luck” in Arabic, mabrouka is precisely what you’ll feel when stepping through the gates of the hillside estate of the late purveyor of haute couture Yves Saint Laurent. The fashion house icon and his partner fell under Tangier’s spell in 1990 and commissioned French designer Jacques Grange to create a vacation home that reflected the city’s eccentric, literary past. More recently, British designer Jasper Conran lovingly transformed the 12-suite property into a hotel that honors its provenance, with sweeping lawns, two pools (one carved dramatically into a clifftop rock) and walls saturated with the aesthetic intelligence of the man who dreamt them up. Many original furnishings still stand, as do Grange’s bejmat tiles and antique Fez embroideries — ensuring that the spirit of Saint Laurent, who called Tangier an inexhaustible source of inspiration, remains.
Photography provided by Kennedy Cottage
Kennedy Cottage at San Ysidro Ranch
In September 1953, John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy arrived at San Ysidro Ranch in the citrus-scented foothills above Montecito to spend their honeymoon in a hand-carved stone cottage overlooking the Pacific. The ranch has sheltered other luminaries including Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh and Sir Laurence Olivier, but it is the Kennedys who lent the cottage its most enduring mystique. The property now bearing their name is a 2,700-square-foot, two-bedroom private retreat with four-poster canopy beds, Old World fireplaces, French doors opening onto a terrace and a sunken hot tub perfectly positioned for watching the Channel Islands dissolve into the horizon each evening. Legend holds that the young couple requested cream puffs during their stay, and the ranch has been serving them to Kennedy Cottage guests ever since.
Photography provided by Hotel El Palace
Salvador Dalí Art Suite, Hotel El Palace
Salvador Dalí was not a man who passed through a hotel room quickly. During the 1970s, the surrealist master lived for extended periods in a two-bedroom suite at Hotel El Palace, then known as the Ritz Barcelona, where he received visitors, photographed models, and conducted performances for the press that blurred the line between celebrity stunt and living art. His suite was carefully preserved and renamed in his honor. Antiques dating back to the hotel’s 1919 opening share space with fabrics modeled on 17th-century Italian damasks, and the bathroom where Dalí’s photographic provocations unfolded gleams with its original marble fixtures. Staying here is an exercise in the kind of imagination that sees the world as Dalí did: beautifully and hilariously strange.
Photography provided by Casa Kimberly
Casa Kimberly
Few love stories have played out against a more cinematic backdrop than Elizabeth Taylor and Sir Richard Burton’s. The pair acquired twin houses on opposite sides of a cobblestoned Puerto Vallarta street in the 1960s and proceeded to connect them with a puente del amor (bridge of love) so they could visit each other without the intrusion of pesky paparazzi. For 11 years, the home served as the couple’s sanctuary, and the 25-room boutique hotel it became still radiates Taylor’s particular brand of unapologetic glamour. Rooms are bold and sensuous with jewel-toned textiles, hand-painted Talavera tiles, four-poster beds, and sumptuous terraces offering panoramic views over the village and azure sea below. The original pink-stone bathtub was commissioned by Mexican artisans, who misunderstood the request for a valentine heart-shape and instead delivered a tub appearing to mimic an anatomical heart. It remains in Taylor’s former primary suite today, available to guests ready to surrender entirely to the fantasy.
Photography provided by Abaca Press/Alamy
Villa Casa Casuarina
Miami Beach, Florida
Gianni Versace purchased this Miami mansion in the early 1990s and spent three years transforming it into his personal vision of excess. Hand-painted frescoes, a mosaic swimming pool inlaid with 24-karat gold and some of the most exuberant interiors on earth define a property that treats extravagance as an art form. The designer lived here until his death in 1997 and was known to have hosted the likes of Princess Diana and Sir Elton John within its ornate walls. Now operating as a 10-suite hotel, Villa Casa Casuarina remains faithfully un-subtle. Guests can spend a sun-drenched afternoon by the pool before dining at Gianni’s, where Italian-Mediterranean cuisine is served on Versace-designed Rosenthal china. Versace believed that a room, like a garment, should make you feel transformed the moment you step into it, and few hotels make that case more convincingly.
