Travel 4 minutes 12 February 2024

Palisociety Takes the Show on the Road

Every city would be lucky to have a Pali hotel. If things continue like they are, every city might have the chance. The California-born group is growing fast.

The hotels below are part of the MICHELIN Guide hotel selection. Each of the 5,000+ hotels in the selection has been chosen by our experts for its extraordinary style, service, and personality — and each can be booked on the MICHELIN Guide website and app.

“I put in the time and energy to understand how every hotel will add value to each neighborhood we inhabit.”

That was Palisociety founder Avi Brosh when we spoke with him in 2020, right after Pali completed an expansion from three hotels to nine. “Every piece of furniture, every flooring detail, every wallpaper pattern has to go through me,” he insisted then. When you looked at the remarkable consistency of design at Pali properties, and how well they’d incorporated their local surroundings, it was easy to believe.

Having a great team around you, as Brosh does, is crucial. Having a singular vision, as Brosh does, might be even more important. Especially when your plans include continued ambitious expansion, as his did.

How could Pali keep up the pace without its hands-on owner losing his head? Four years on, we’re relieved to see that they’ve kept up just fine and that, yes, Brosh has finally accepted a little help from his friends. Four preexisting hotels from the Arrive group — in Austin, Palm Springs, Memphis, and Wilmington — have joined the Pali society, bringing an almost identical hyper-local sensibility. It’s a hand-in-glove fit for Brosh, and adds a certain tech-friendly youthfulness to the portfolio.

Le Petit Pali at Ocean Avenue — Carmel, California
Le Petit Pali at Ocean Avenue — Carmel, California

Meanwhile, they’ve also reincarnated their very first hotel as the Palihouse West Hollywood, launched new hotels in San Diego, Hollywood, Portland, and Tampa, and created yet another brand with the Pali name.

In Le Petit Pali, Brosh presents his take on the more intimate bed and breakfast — revamping small inns in favorite California locales, starting with Carmel-by-the-Sea, and soon Brentwood, Laguna, and St. Helena. With two more Arrives on the way, in Albuquerque and New Orleans, Pali is showing no signs of slowing down.

The goal of everything, Brosh once told us, is to be the hotel that locals recommend to their friends visiting town. If the below list of recent openings is any indication, they wont stop until they have friends in every city in America.


Palihouse West Hollywood

West Hollywood, CA

The very first Palisociety hotel was the Palihouse Holloway, a boutique-chic extended-stay concept named for its West Hollywood address. A decade and a half and more than a few Palisociety openings later, the brand has revisited its roots, with what’s less a simple renovation and more a total replacement of its original hotel: the 95-room Palihouse West Hollywood.

Book Palihouse West Hollywood on MICHELIN Guide →

Palihotel San Diego

San Diego, CA

The original Hotel St. James sign still stands atop this 1912 Victorian-style hotel building in San Diego’s nightlife-focused Gaslamp Quarter. Today, though, the old St. James is now Palihotel San Diego. It’s a 122-room boutique that aims to preserve the character of its setting, from the marble staircase and the vintage elevators to the Victorian architectural details in the rooms.

Book Palihotel San Diego on MICHELIN Guide →

Palihouse Hyde Park Village

Tampa, FL

Palisociety’s colorful, eclectic, European-influenced style travels remarkably well; while Palihouse Hyde Park Village bears an obvious family resemblance to the other hotels of the same name, it looks perfectly at home on the Gulf Coast of Florida, just across the river from downtown Tampa, in an open-air mixed-use development with shops, restaurants, and now, a remarkably stylish boutique hotel.

Book Palihouse Hyde Park Village on MICHELIN Guide →

Palihotel Hollywood

Los Angeles, California

There’s no mistaking the Palihotels aesthetic, marked as it is by a distinctive palette of soft colors and an eclectic design sense that’s equally reminiscent of modern boutique hotels and classic European inns. This is true even when the hotel in question is a renovation of a 1958 motel, which is what the Palihotel Hollywood is — now a 76-room boutique hotel right on Sunset Boulevard, complete with a spa, a courtyard swimming pool, and a poolside restaurant and bar.

Book Palihotel Hollywood on MICHELIN Guide →

Le Petit Pali at 8th Ave

Carmel, California

It shares the certain unpretentious, vintage-inspired warmth of all the Palisociety hotels, but Le Petit Pali at 8th Ave is a 24-room inn that’s closer in its scale and its concept to a seaside bed-and-breakfast than an urban boutique hotel. It occupies a charming and thoroughly Californian Craftsman-style building, which is aesthetically a perfect match for Palisociety’s eclectic interiors.

Book Le Petit Pali at 8th Ave on MICHELIN Guide →

Le Petit Pali at Ocean Ave

Carmel, California

One of a pair with Le Petit Pali at 8th Avenue, this one, at 34 rooms, is similarly intimate, and a fine match for the relatively tranquil atmosphere of this classic California coastal town. Some rooms and suites come with gas fireplaces, and all of them freely combine vintage- and antique-inspired furniture and artworks with unobtrusively modern boutique-hotel comforts.

Book Le Petit Pali at Ocean Ave on MICHELIN Guide →

Hotel Grand Stark

Portland, Oregon

In one of Portland’s most up-and-coming corners is a hotel that puts its guests right in the thick of it. The Grand Stark is named for the intersection on which it stands, but it’s unmistakably Pali, with rooms decorated in a style that’s identifiably Northwestern but without any forest kitsch, and with public spaces that recall the days of the Grand Stark’s founding more than a century ago.

Book Hotel Grand Stark on MICHELIN Guide →

ARRIVE Austin

Austin, Texas

The east side of Austin has long been the city’s less polished, more creative side, and it still is. Though it’d be a stretch to call Arrive Austin unpolished, its industrial-inspired interiors and its sociable, communal atmosphere remain true to the spirit of the neighborhood. “Industrial-inspired” doesn’t mean cold either — in true Pali fashion the concrete surfaces are warmed by blond wood, graphic wallpaper, and colorful artworks.

Book ARRIVE Austin on MICHELIN Guide →

ARRIVE Palm Springs

Palm Springs, California

The architecture at Arrive Palm Springs is distinctive, and traces its heritage to the local style. Interiors feature some retro-inspired elements as well, from Victorian-style wallpaper and curvaceous leather armchairs to modernist chairs, desks, and lamps. But this is no throwback. This is pure 21st-century Palm Springs — and like any Pali production, it all adds up to a vibe that’s warm and appealingly eclectic.

Book ARRIVE Palm Springs on MICHELIN Guide →

ARRIVE Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee

Palisociety’s Arrive hotels are all different, carefully tailored to their settings in some of America’s most unique neighborhoods. But they share plenty as well: all are vibrant and eclectic in their design sense, and all include dining and drinking venues that connect them to the local flavors and traditions. Arrive Memphis begins with a lovely old industrial building on South Main, in the city’s Arts District, close to Beale Street and Downtown Memphis.

Book ARRIVE Memphis on MICHELIN Guide →

ARRIVE Wilmington

Wilmington, North Carolina

Arrive Wilmington is painstakingly tailored to its setting, a marriage of three historic structures in the waterfront district, and combines a bit of rough-edged post-industrial patina with genteel Southern charm — in typical Palisociety style it’s decorated with whimsical patterned wallpaper and an eclectic array of furnishings, including antiques, mid-century modern pieces, and contemporary additions.

Book ARRIVE Wilmington on MICHELIN Guide →

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Top image: Palihotel San Diego — San Diego, CA

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