CUT by Wolfgang Puck marked twenty years at the Beverly Wilshire hotel with an invitation dinner billed as The World of CUT on 20 August 2026, capping a long run of investment across the Beverly Hills address that British travellers recognise from Pretty Woman without always knowing its name.
For companies weighing where to put staff on a west coast trip, that spending matters rather more than the film credit. The property runs to 395 rooms across seventeen categories, employs more than 800 staff, and was the only hotel in California to make Food and Wine’s first hotel awards list.
From board track speedway to Beverly Hills landmark
Before the hotel opened in 1928, the site carried the Beverly Auto Speedway, then the second largest board track in the country after Indianapolis, where residents picnicked while Model T Fords raced. Two Renaissance Revival buildings stand there now: the ten storey Wilshire Wing of 1928 and the fourteen storey Beverly Wing, added in 1971 over the original pool and tennis courts.
The porte cochere linking them was assembled from borrowed grandeur, with a gate modelled on Buckingham Palace, gas lamps from Edinburgh, an original El Camino Real bell marker and a cobblestone driveway laid in imported Italian stone. The building survived earthquakes in 1933, 1971 and 1994, served as a designated air raid shelter during the Second World War, joined the National Register of Historic Places on 12 June 1987 and became part of Four Seasons in 1992. It sits close to the studios and Century City offices that feature in our Los Angeles business travel hotspots round-up.
Where was Pretty Woman filmed
Here. The 1990 film used the Beverly Wilshire hotel as its central location, with the lobby and Presidential Suite inspiring sets built at a nearby studio. Elvis Presley, Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty all lived on the property, Beatty for some fifteen years, and fan mail for all three still arrives at the front desk. It has since appeared in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Clueless, Sex and the City and Valentine’s Day, and repeatedly across Entourage. In THE Blvd, the lobby restaurant and bar, the Feeling Pretty cocktail remains the most ordered drink at more than four thousand a year.
What the Beverly Wilshire hotel offers on a work trip
A multimillion dollar renovation completed in 2022, carried out by David Collins Studio, reworked every guest room, suite and corridor across both wings in soft pastels and cream, unifying the two wings for the first time. A curated art programme followed, including Alberto Seveso’s Splash Black in the Wilshire Presidential Suite and abstract work by Christina Craemer and Jason Demeo. The Penthouse Suite on the fourteenth floor of the Beverly Wing runs to 5,000 square feet with 270 degree views over Rodeo Drive, the Hollywood Hills, Century City and Downtown.
The Spa reopened in 2025 after a redesign, spanning more than 8,000 square feet with nine treatment rooms, seven of them with showers, and introducing a signature Renewal Ritual. It has held the Forbes Travel Guide Five Star award every year since 2016, one of only a handful of spas in Los Angeles to manage it. Any treatment of sixty minutes or longer opens the wider facilities, including the bi level fitness centre and the Mediterranean style outdoor pool, built as a copy of the one at Sophia Loren’s villa in Italy.
Dining is anchored by CUT, the chef’s first steakhouse, which opened in June 2006 in a room designed by Richard Meier and hung with work by John Baldessari alongside portraits by Martin Schoeller. Earlier this year the restaurant launched The First CUT, a reimagined early evening service that suits anyone facing a morning departure covered in our LAX airport guide.
Plenty of famous hotels charge for the address and let the building age around the guests. The Four Seasons Beverly Hills property has done the opposite, spending repeatedly while keeping the history intact. With the city gearing up for the Games that prompted Virgin Atlantic to replace British Airways as the Team GB airline, that is worth noting now.
