8 Incredible Hotels Where Famous Authors Have Lived and Worked

F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t just sleep here. In 1925, when it was a private home, he rented what was then called the Villa Saint Louis as a summer place for himself, his wife Zelda, and their daughter, Scottie. They loved it so much that they returned the next two summers, and the author kept busy socializing with luminaries including Picasso and Gerald and Sara Murphy, writing Tender Is the Night, which is set in Antibes, and helping transform the coastal fishing villages of the Riviera into a summer playground. In 1929, with the Fitzgeralds gone, the villa opened as the Hotel Belles Rives, a landmark resort that continues to party on, Jazz Age style, and is still run by the same family that launched the property. There’s a beach club, a Michelin-starred restaurant (La Passagere), and the Bar Fitzgerald. Each year, the resort awards the Prix Fitzgerald to a writer whose work embodies Fitzgerald’s spirit, keeping his legend alive on-site. As for guests, the hope is that they will experience some of the joy the author himself felt in the space. A plaque at the hotel is engraved with the following lines from a 1926 letter from Fitzgerald to Hemingway: “With our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Riviera (between Nice and Cannes), I’m happier than I’ve been for years. It’s one of those strange, precious, and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well.”

As for Hemingway himself, his happy place seems to have been Sun Valley, Idaho, where he could do all his favorite things: hunt and fish in what is now the Silver Creek Preserve, eat and drink at Michel’s Christiana’s restaurant, and write. He discovered his own private Idaho in 1939 when he was invited to be a celebrity writer in residence at the Sun Valley Lodge as part of the property’s PR initiative to attract guests to the new resort, which opened in 1937. Hemingway finished For Whom the Bell Tolls there in 1939 while staying in Suite 206 with Martha Gelhorn, who became his third wife. You can follow in his footsteps by booking the Celebrity Suite named for him (other options include former visitors Clint Eastwood and Sonia Henie). But guests in any of the 108 rooms on the property can enjoy the vast spa, outdoor pool, restaurants, and yoga studio — when they’re not out horseback riding in summer, skiing in winter, or generally being rugged and outdoorsy, like Papa himself.

This stone sanctuary overlooking a cove in the Mani, one of the windswept peninsulas in Greece’s Peloponnese, comes by its double-billed name, honestly. Patrick was the World-War-II-hero-turned-travel-writer who immortalized the region in his travelogue Mani and decided to build a home there. He recalled seeing “all these wild mountains, and the olives and the water and the islands,” and thinking, “Here would be an ideal place to live.” However, it was former debutante Joan who sold her jewelry to fund the building of the villa. In their wills, they left the property to Greece’s Benaki Museum, which utilizes it as a retreat for scholars for nine months of the year and allows Aria Hotels to offer it to guests during the summer, thus funding the renovation and upkeep of the place. With Paddy and Joan’s books on the shelves, their former housekeeper dishing up meals, and the round tabletop he rolled down the mountainside to install in the living room, the house reverberates with dynamic couple’s personalities throughout. But you could know nothing about them and still love this retreat for the stone steps leading to the cove below (where Paddy swam until he was 94), the tree-lined pool, and the endless views.

When Ian Fleming bought his property in Jamaica in 1946, he named it after the British naval operation that first brought him to the island during World War II. He wrote all 13 James Bond novels in the villa he had built on-site. (Dr. No, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun are also set on the island.) Today, the Fleming Villa is just one of the accommodation options in the GoldenEye resort complex, which has grown from Fleming’s original 15 acres to 52 under the ambitious eyes of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. (Fun fact: Blackwell purchased GoldenEye from Bob Marley, who had bought it from Fleming.) If not staying in the author’s former home, guests can also choose from the “beach huts” on the cove, cottages whose steps lead right into the lagoon, or roomier villas, all complete with outdoor showers. They’re welcome to practice spycraft or write bestselling thrillers. But they might opt for paddleboarding, snorkeling, or kayaking instead. Sunbathing by one of the pools with a tropical drink (heavy on the Blackwell Rum) is not frowned upon.

A convent for almost 250 years (from 1621 to 1861), the Hotel Santa Clara then spent the next century and change as a charity hospital, a prison, and a medical school before debuting as a hotel in 1995. A local landmark within a walled city so historic it’s been named a World Heritage by UNESCO, the Hotel Santa Clara (now part of the Sofitel Legend Collection) has always been the site of dramatic plot twists. This was true even back in 1949 when then-cub-reporter Gabriel García Marquez went to cover excavation work in the former convent and witnessed a crypt that held a skeleton with a long mane of red hair. The incident inspired his short story Of Love and Other Demons. Today, hotel guests can tour the same crypt and a hall named after the Nobel prize winner, carved with quotes from his books, in the company of one of the hotel butlers. Spending the day lounging by the pool bar (once the nuns’ orchard) is a fine option, and exploring the magical realist city is an even better one. Still, you wouldn’t be the first guest to while away the hours roaming the hallways searching for hidden confessionals.

Agatha Christie’s beloved second husband was an archaeologist. And while he excavated pharaohs’ tombs, the Mrs. kept busy writing Death on the Nile. She penned the blockbuster bestseller in a suite with a Nile view at the Old Cataract Hotel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her book characters stayed at the same institution. Today, this grand hotel, too, is part of the Sofitel Legend Collection, and you can venerate Christie’s mahogany desk and wicker chair in the lobby or visit her suite on a walking tour. The building itself could be a historical monument, a Victorian gem dating back to 1899. (Winston Churchill also stayed here, bumping into Christie more than once.) When you’re not geeking out over Christie’s suite or sitting in your own wicker chair watching the feluccas sail by, you can swim in the palm-tree-ringed pool, order flambéed desserts at the 1902 Restaurant on-site, or head off the property to visit the temple of Abu Simbel (with its massive statues of Ramesses II) or the Aswan Botanical Garden. Just take a lesson from Christie’s characters and watch your back.

When this luxurious hotel was the luxurious private home of the Steyn family, Nelson Mandela, having been released from prison, stayed with them for six months, completing his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom. It was converted into a 26-suite hotel in 2020 and has since expanded with more villas. However, Mandela’s influence can still be seen in the graceful reception area, where the collection of artwork includes Dean Simon’s “The Five Faces of Mandela,” which depicts the Nobel Peace Prize winner in various stages of life from a young boy to an elder statesman. Of course, there’s also the Nelson Mandela Platinum Suite, reachable via a glass elevator and complete with a 24-hour butler. (Yes, it was created out of Mandela’s very own guest suite when he stayed here.) 

You’ll enjoy the art-filled halls, the elegant restaurant Qunu, which serves vegetables grown on-site in the garden, and the central infinity pool. But if you really want to follow in Mandela’s footsteps, you’ll also book a visit to the Saxon’s sister property, Shambala, a private game reserve where Mandela, again hosted by Steyn, spent summers as South Africa’s first democratically elected president until he died in 2013. At Shambala, you’re liable to spot hippos, leopards, and elephants on the reserve and inside the Nelson Mandela Villa, you’ll notice a Picasso on the wall.

You might be better off asking which writer known for depicting Vietnam of days gone by didn’t stay at the Metropole rather than which ones did. The grand hotel opened in 1901 and almost immediately became a literary haven. Somerset Maugham wrote The Gentleman in the Parlour, his Asian travelogue, here, and Graham Greene penned The Quiet American in the hotel while on assignment from Paris Match. Marguerite Duras also checked in, and the hotel, with its French haute cuisine restaurant, Le Beaulieu, and grand architecture, conjures the atmosphere of her novel The Lover, which chronicles a forbidden affair steeped in the country’s French colonial era. (Sadly, Duras does not have a suite named after her, although Maugham, Greene, and Charlie Chaplin, who honeymooned here with Paulette Goddard in 1936, do.) 

The country’s military, as well as literary, history is alive here, too; when the Bamboo Bar was being renovated in 2011, workers stumbled upon the sealed-off bunker that protected guests — including famous activists Jane Fonda and Joan Baez — from 1964 to 1973, during what the hotel calls The American War. With over 120 years of history behind its stately doors, the Metropole (the first hotel in Sofitel’s Legends collection) is an atmospheric place to write your travelogue, have your own illicit romance, or explore the rediscovered bunker.