San Francisco Proper Hotel

Proper Hospitality's first hotel opened in September 2017 inside a 1904 Albert Pissis flatiron at 7th and Market, previously the fire-damaged Renoir Hotel. Kelly Wearstler's maximalist interiors and the Charmaine's rooftop turned a contested corner of Mid-Market into one of the city's most talked-about hotel openings, and set the design language Proper has used for every property since.

The place

The hotel occupies the point of a Beaux-Arts flatiron building where Market, 7th and McAllister streets meet, with its entrance at 45 McAllister Street (1100 Market Street). This is Mid-Market — City Hall and the Civic Center performing-arts cluster sit a few blocks north, the Tenderloin immediately west — a neighborhood San Francisco has spent two decades trying to revive around the tech-company campuses (Twitter, Uber) that moved into the same stretch of Market Street. It's a deliberately unglamorous address for a luxury hotel, and part of the project's point.

The concept

The building went up in 1904 to a design by Albert Pissis, the architect most responsible for bringing Beaux-Arts classicism to San Francisco; it later operated as the Renoir Hotel and sat damaged after a 2014 fire before developer Kor Group and Proper Hospitality took it on as their first project under the Proper name. Kelly Wearstler led the interior transformation, keeping the original marble floors and 17-foot lobby walls and layering in references to Cubism, Viennese Secession, French Deco and Swedish modernism — a maximalist, art-filled counterpoint to the glass-box hotels that dominate the neighborhood's newer stock. Every guest room has a view, a byproduct of the building's flatiron footprint, and is fitted with Aireloom beds, Italian linens and Aesop amenities. As the brand's flagship, the hotel set the template — restored historic shell, maximalist interiors, a buzzy rooftop — that Proper Hospitality has since repeated in other cities, aimed at design-literate travelers who want a hotel that reads as art collection rather than luxury showroom.

Dining & wellness

Villon, the all-day American restaurant helmed at opening by chef Jason Franey, opened in September 2017. Charmaine's, the eighth-floor rooftop bar and lounge roughly 120 feet above Market Street, pairs a glass-enclosed room with an outdoor terrace looking toward Nob Hill, SoMa and City Hall; its design draws on Jean Royère, Gio Ponti and Pierre Chareau, with red-painted metal columns echoing the Golden Gate Bridge. The hotel also runs La Bande, a ground-floor café, plus a fitness room and a residential-style lobby salon.