Sylvia Beach Hotel

The Sylvia Beach Hotel is a weathered cliff-top hotel above Nye Beach, famous less for its rooms than for its premise: twenty bedrooms each decorated as a tribute to a particular author. Agatha Christie's room has a body outline in chalk on the floor; Edgar Allan Poe's has a pendulum and a stuffed raven; Dr. Seuss's is striped in red and blue.

You do not need to be a guest to visit — the library on the top floor and the ground-floor restaurant Tables of Content are open to walk-ins. Tables of Content serves a fixed-menu dinner with assigned seating and a literary table game. Even if you do not eat, climb up to the library at sunset for a drink with a great view of the surf.

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A story
The hotel takes its name from Sylvia Beach, the American who ran the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in 1920s Paris and first published James Joyce's Ulysses. The hotel itself dates to 1912 — originally the Hotel Gilmore and later the New Cliff House — and was rescued from closure in the 1980s by two booksellers who turned every room into a tribute to a different writer.