Six times I've been to the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles and still I drove right past. The five-hectare property is so recessed in its own foliage; there's barely anything to see of it from the road. A sign you might wonder? Dear heaven, no - nothing so coarse in this elite neighbourhood where the private residences are as large and reclusive as this luxury hotel. There is just a quiet plaque embedded in the stone wall of a forecourt where the valet took my car and hid it from the limos.

The Hotel Bel-Air is a retreat for the aristocracy of Los Angeles and its movie business. Hot screen faces and rock stars hang out in The Sunset Marquee behind the Strip or on the Santa Monica waterfront. Silkier movie skins, power brokers and minor royals disappear into the plush monasticism of the Bel -Air. This luxury hotel runs on a fuel rich in serenity and fancies itself as removed from 'town'.

The facilities

The Bel-Air is not for those who value the more strident facilities of the international five-star luxury hotel. It is not for those who pride themselves on knowing the value of money. It is the converted ranch format - much favoured by Americans -applied with a plutocratic intensity without erring on the snobby side.

The Hotel Bel-Air’s pool is an oval shape and folks flop around it at will. I remember in '96 lying there with a movie producer's power breakfast going on. An actress whose name I couldn't remember thought she knew mine and kept smiling cautiously at me.

Dinner on The Terrace in this luxury hotel is a filling fusion of European and Californian fare prepared by the English head chef Thomas Hanson, who is not frightened of facing the picky California rich with a meat and two veg - although he occasionally fuses European and Mexican fare, and the violently late emperor Maximilian would tell you that doesn't always work. Lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air is a social event and quite do-able the year round thanks to heaters installed overhead and radiant heating under the floor tiles.

The rooms

The staff showed me to the Swan Lake Suite, a bungalow behind a white picket fence, 750sq ft, with a 600sq ft patio. The Hotel Bel-Air goes for a palatial simplicity, the suites are miniature country houses; toy dream homes with all the messy bits like kitchens lopped off. I could imagine Nicholas II and his little tsaritsas enjoying it. They would have told the servant to light the fire (real wood with gas), flop into the deep sofas and let the dogs run.

I took a Jacuzzi bath, looking through French windows onto the patio, then wandered into the pathways past room # 99 (a favourite of David Niven's), tucked behind the pool diving board where Monroe posed; past #155 where Mario Lanzo rattled the window panes then past #140 where Judy Garland's pill boxes fought for space with the bottles and back to the bar where I fell in amongst a pack of Republican film producers.