Julian Castaldi x Chateau Marmont [Los Angeles]

For most people, a canceled flight home means a few frustrating days in an airport hotel. For me, it became a two-week gift. A friend who managed Chateau Marmont, the ivy-draped, castle-shaped hotel that has loomed over Sunset Boulevard since 1929, offered me something no publicist or PR package could buy: free rein to wander the property with my camera, unsupervised and unhurried, for as long as the ash cloud kept me grounded.
I had been to Chateau Marmont before and, more importantly, Bar Marmont, Now that bar has some stories to tell.

Moving through the bungalows, the pool deck, and the wrought-iron balconies overlooking the Sunset Strip, and downstairs into Bar Marmont, the hotel's low-lit lounge that has served as an off-the-record confessional for the industry since it opened in the 1990s. With the hotel's blessing and no handler trailing me, I could shoot the Chateau the way its regulars actually experience it: quiet mornings, the hush after a party, light falling through curtains rather than camera flashes.

The Château's Strange History, I wasn't shooting just any hotel. Chateau Marmont was built as an apartment building in 1929, modelled loosely on the Château d'Amboise in France's Loire Valley, the same chateau where Leonardo da Vinci is buried, after developer Fred Horowitz returned from a European trip with photographs of it in hand. Financial trouble during the Depression forced the building's conversion into a hotel, and it has operated as one, on and off, ever since.

What makes the Marmont legendary isn't its architecture so much as its discretion. In the 1930s, a studio boss reportedly told two unruly young actors that if they wanted to be seen, they should go to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and if they didn't, they should go to Chateau Marmont. Decades later, Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn is said to have given his stars similar advice: if you're going to get into trouble, do it at the Marmont, where nobody would tell. That reputation for privacy is exactly what produced its most famous stories.

James Dean reportedly climbed through a window for his audition for Rebel Without a Cause. Led Zeppelin, staying at the hotel in 1968, became notorious for their chaotic visits, drummer John Bonham was said to have ridden a motorcycle through the hallways and, on another occasion, cooked the band a full Christmas dinner using the hotel's kitchens.

Jim Morrison fell while trying to swing between balconies, an incident that's become part of Chateau Marmont lore.
Graham Nash lived at the hotel for five months in 1971 after his breakup with Joni Mitchell, later writing a song about the bungalow he stayed in.

John Belushi died in Bungalow 3 in March 1982 after a night of drug use, an event that turned the once-whispered-about hotel into a tabloid fixture almost overnight.
Helmut Newton, the fashion photographer, suffered a fatal heart attack behind the wheel while pulling out of the hotel's driveway in 2004.

The hotel changed hands several times over the decades before investor André Balazs bought it in 1992 and set about restoring its cachet, adding the restaurant and Bar Marmont in the process. Under Balazs, the Chateau shifted from a fading curiosity into the industry's preferred off-duty clubhouse, the kind of place where deals get made by the pool as often as they get made in an office.

Visit Chateau Marmont :
chateaumarmont.com
instagram.com/chateaumarmont