The very name Los Angeles—the “City of Angels”—is plural for a reason. This place contains multitudes; it is not any one thing or singular set of shared realities, but rather a series of overlapping metaphysical geographies, vast and intimidating yet surprisingly human, intimate and personal.

Los Angeles is more beautiful than you're prepared for. There’s urban grit here, of course, and freeways and off-ramps and parking lots, but also perfumed hillsides alive with birdsong and flowering citrus trees, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, gorgeous mountains framing the city to the east, flowers everywhere, and the world-famous beaches. Griffith Park offers a glimpse of this beauty, and so do hikes around Moon Canyon in the hills of Mount Washington.

Where to Stay

The first rule of where to stay in LA is to ask, “Where am I going to need to be on this trip?” Remember—we want to cut down on car time and cross-city travel so you can enjoy more stuff. Here’s a handful of hotels, each in very different sections of the city, that would make fine base camps for further exploration, plus one hotel so famous and classic I would be remiss not to include its glories on this list.

4141 Santa Monica Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 486-7225. Located just off Silver Lake junction—where Sunset Boulevard meets Santa Monica Boulevard—this hotel is ideally located if you’ve got stuff happening in Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz or East Hollywood. Koreatown and Hollywood proper aren’t far, either, and it’s a short hop across the river for hangs in Highland Park, Atwater Village, and Mount Washington.

Silver Lake Pool & Inn oozes LA to me. A former motor inn turned into a don’t-call-it-hipster, “upwardly mobile young urban adult with expendable income” playhouse, the hotel’s epic second-floor pool, courtyard restaurant, and comfortable desert-motif rooms tick a lot of boxes. You could work by the pool; you could walk to the spiffy new Erewhon location next door for a $20 celebrity smoothie (they are unfortunately very good); you could walk another block up to the original LA location of Intelligentsia Coffee, the first really important modern coffee bar to open in the city. For the truly bold and cheap among us with a particularly high risk tolerance for such things (it me), there’s even street parking to be sussed out in the neighborhood directly above the hotel, which allows you to skip the valet fee. I’ve stayed here several times and will do so again.