SAN FRANCISCO — Sitting in the lobby of the Proper Hotel here, a guest can sip on a rich cup of Counter Culture coffee, roasted just across the bay in Berkeley; nibble on a dish of oats with grapes and melon from a gorgeous clay bowl; listen to tunes ranging from Sly and the Family Stone to the Smiths; gaze at the dozens upon dozens of modern art pieces, mirrors and light sconces on the walls; and, if paying close enough attention, feel the slight rumble of the BART and Muni Metro commuter trains underneath the hotel's Market Street location.
It really is a feast for the senses.
Watch enough cooking-competition shows on the Food Network (as I do), and either a chef or judge will invariably utter the term "flavor forward." And while I'm usually not a fan of the term — it's an affected way of saying "spicy," "rich," "pungent" or even "not bland" — it's an apropos way to describe the Proper approach.
Conceived by the same team that birthed Viceroy Hotels, the San Francisco Proper opened last September as the first example of the brand's luxury-lifestyle hotel. It's slated to include outposts in downtown Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Calif., and Austin, Texas, by next year (the same group opened Los Angeles' Hollywood Proper in 2016 as a luxury residential project).
The hotel was developed out of what had been the Renoir Hotel in a structure that was literally built out of the ashes of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
It's located on a section of Market Street where the Civic Center, the Tenderloin and the South of Market districts meet, an area now known as Mid-Market, where the city is putting considerable effort into eliminating much of the area's blight and where companies such as Twitter and Dolby Laboratories have recently moved headquarters.
What this means on the outside is a mix of tech workers, commuters, city workers, tourists and the homeless moving around the exterior of the triangular structure. Step inside the 131-room hotel, and the experience can be similarly overwhelming, though in a more genteel way.
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As at many lifestyle hotels, the two-story lobby is broken up into zones: one small sitting area near the Proper's northern entry, then various clusters of rich-colored chairs, couches, love seats and tables (each on their own area rugs) sprinkled across the white-marble floor amid the building's white, square columns and wall art (I counted more than 70 pieces).
Bordering Market Street is the all-day restaurant Villon, which is named after a 15th-century French poet and serves guests sitting in either its 50-seat, turquoise-hued dining area or in the lobby.
In addition to serving contemporary American cuisine, the restaurant is notable for its "7x7" beverage theme, an homage to the city's geography (San Francisco is approximately seven miles by seven miles). This means 49 drinks broken up into groups of seven, including seven drinks invented at a hotel (such as the pina colada and the sidecar) and seven drinks made famous in the San Francisco Bay Area (such as the mai tai, lemon drop and, of course, Irish coffee).
The San Francisco Proper's food and beverage program also includes the stunning Charmaine's rooftop bar and lounge (finding a bad rooftop vista in San Francisco is pretty much impossible), while a street-level cafe called La Bande is slated to open by spring.
Upstairs, our hosted stay was in a double queen room. What it lacked in size it more than made up for in color and bells and whistles. With each of the four walls covered in a different wallpaper print plus a fifth on the window shade, the floral-and-leaf motif served as a clever reminder of the building's more baroque origins, as did the blacks and greys of the bathroom tiles and fixtures.
Making the room more up to date, though, were both the light wood floors and the high-tech amenities, which included in-room tablet computers with a Proper app for operating room controls as well as smart TVs with Google Chromecast and wireless Vifa-branded speakers (they sort of look like small purses), all of which made it pretty easy to program a TV with any of our video subscriptions or to stream music from personal devices.
The hotel offers free Shinola-branded bikes for guests to tour the city. The Shinola touch may be a little too hipster for my taste, but the hotel concierge's genuine enthusiasm made the offer more than forgivable.
Weekend rates at the San Francisco Proper for late February range from $196 a night for a Deluxe Queen to $434 a night for the Premier Suite.