Taj Campton Place

Campton Place is tucked away as discreetly as a luxury hotel can be, just off Union Square and right in the shadow of some more famous big-chain hotels. These days it’s owned by the Taj group, but don’t expect a complete re-branding — this is a century-old San Francisco classic, and only the subtlest of updates were required in order to keep it current with the state of the luxury-hotel art.

What is distinctly Taj-like is the service, which is hyper-attentive and highly professional, in a way that’s not exactly common in American hotels. Rooms are classic, contemporary but far from modernist — here at the high end there’s little tolerance for high-design minimalism. Instead look for classics like Bose wave radios and feather beds with down duvets.

With just over a hundred rooms, it’s smaller than some so-called boutiques — and there’s a hush of privacy about the place that its bigger five-star competitors can’t quite match. The Campton Place restaurant is an institution unto itself, and the new owners know better than to tamper with success: it still serves the same upscale Mediterranean-inflected cuisine in the same ultra-swanky dining room.