Stay: The Hotels of James Bond

Every guy has dreamed of living the Bond life at some point in time. What man wouldn’t want to drive missile-equipped Aston Martins, blow through government slush funds on the tables of Monaco and spar with Grace Jones in bed woo every striking woman in a 200 mile radius while drinking the finest champagne?

Practicing your Scottish accent in the mirror won’t guarantee that any of these things will happen to you. But following 007’s jet-setting contrails? That’s totally doable boys, and it starts with finding the right place to stay on this list of Bond-approved accommodations.

Peninsula Hotel

Location: Hong Kong, China
Movie Appearance: The Man with the Golden Gun

The Peninsula Hotel was doing pretty darn well before Mr. Bond’s visit. Its world-class service, cutting-edge accommodations and a fleet of Rolls Royce Phantoms took care of that already. This was, after all, one of the first hotels to pioneer luxuries like bathtub-side telephones and bedroom control panels. Still, having 007 on the guest list certainly didn’t hurt its reputation. Now after 84 years of service, the Hong Kong institution has completed the first stage of a $58 million dollar renovation of all of its guest rooms, adding customized Samsung Galaxy tablets for entertainment control, wireless VOIP phones for free international calling and even multi-language touch-screen wall panels for adjusting things you wouldn’t dare touch yourself like lights and curtains. The hotel’s private rooftop helipad is also a highlight for those on the go, and has appeared in another movie you might have heard of, The Dark Knight.

Learn More: Here

Stoke Park Hotel and Country Club

Location: Buckinghamshire, England
Movie Appearance: Goldfinger, Tomorrow Never Dies

The Stoke Park Hotel and Country Club did make an appearance in Tomorrow Never Dies, but it’s more famously known as the golf course where Bond faced a cheating Goldfinger and Oddjob demonstrated his deadly bowler hat skills on a few helpless statues. The sprawling 350 acre estate is located 35 minutes from London, in Buckinghamshire, and has far deeper connections to England than mere Bond cameos. Queen Elizabeth I owned Stoke Park from 1581-1603, and many of the facilities as they exist today are the result of another historic owner — John Penn, the son of William Penn, who used the £130,000 the new United States Government paid for his family’s 26-million acre plot in Pennsylvania to develop the land.

The club’s 27-hole golf course, known as Stoke Poges, was designed by H.S. Colt in 1908 and is routinely ranked as one of the top 100 courses on the planet. This is no surprise considering Colt’s apprentice, Dr Alister MacKenzie, was inspired so much by Stoke’s seventh hole that he mirrored it to create the daunting 12th hole at the Augusta National Golf Course. On a similar sporting note, the club’s tennis courts also host the annual Boodles Challenge each June, which is viewed as a warm up for Wimbledon and regularly attended by the sport’s elite.

Stoke’s living accommodations for guests are just as impressive as the sporting facilities. The main mansion boasts 21 individually designed bedrooms, filled with priceless antiques and named after the illustrious residents who stayed there. In 2008, The Pavilion was opened on the grounds with an additional 28 bedrooms, offering an experience on par with today’s contemporary Boutique hotels. Other movies beyond the Bond franchise have also been filmed on the grounds, including the 2004 British crime hit Layer Cake, starring none other than Daniel Craig.

Learn More: Here

Pera Palas Hotel

Location: Instanbul, Turkey
Movie Appearance: From Russia With Love

The Pera Palas Hotel was built in 1892 as Instabul’s first premier lodging to accommodate passengers arriving on the Orient Express. While Bond didn’t stay here in either the film or the book version of From Russia With Love, Sean Connery is shown rowing through the hotel’s distinctive Basilica and 1001 column cistern to spy on the Russian consulate. Plenty of other famous guests, including Ernest Hemmingway, Greta Garbo, and Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan and spy Mata Hari, however, have all been on the hotel’s illustrious guest list. Agatha Christie even pinned her novel Murder On The Orient Express in room 411, which is subsequently named in her honor. After a recent £20 million renovation, the hotel today provides a unique combination of old world charm and modern amenities that any aesthete will gravitate to. In Skyfall, Bond apparently stays in the nearby The Ciragan Palace hotel, the former the home of a sultan, if this Turkish abode doesn’t float your row boat.

Learn More: Here

Taj Lake Palace

Location: Udaipur, India
Movie Appearance: Octopussy

The Taj Lake Palace was originally built in 1743 on a natural 3-acre foundation of rock in Lake Picholo as the royal summer palace of Maharana Jagat Sing II. It was eventually converted into a hotel in the 1950s and appeared in parts of the 1983 Bond film Octopussy as the lair of the bikini-clad Octopus cult. Today, the former palace serves as a luxury hotel of 83 rooms, characterized by its distinctive white marble walls — but its history is not completely forgotten. Many of the “Royal Butlers” employed by the hotel claim to be the descendants of the original palace staff.

Learn More: Here

Grandhotel Pupp

Location: Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic
Movie Appearance: Casino Royale

The Grandhotel Pupp is an historic 228-room luxury hotel originally built between 1896 and 1907 by the Viennese architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer. Though Bond has never visited Karlovy Vary in any of his movies, this hotel poses extensively in 2006 Bond film Casino Royale as the Hotel Splendide in Montenegro where the film’s high-stakes Hold’em game takes place.

Learn More: Here

Hotel Atlantic Kempinski

Location: Hamburg, Germany
Movie Appearance: Tomorrow Never Dies

The Hotel Atlantic is one of the few luxurious hotels to grace the movie franchise where James actually handled some dirty work (outside of the comfort of his bed). In the 1998 Pierce Brosnan flick Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond makes a daring escape on to the hotel’s iconic roof globe after offing his would be torturer Dr. Kaufman. While Bond’s Atlantic suite is available to guests today, it’s not the room shown in the movie. Those scenes were actually filmed in a converted ballroom found at another Bond hotel on this list, the Stoke Park. In May 2008, the front facade of the Atlantic hotel was restored and another 25 million Euro general restoration of the rooms kicked off in 2010, is also now completed. Interestingly enough, the first room finished in the renovations was the so-called BMW Suite, located directly below the Atlantic suite, whose interior was designed with a variety of BMW-inspired touches as part of a co-branded marketing experiment.

Learn More: Here

Fontainbleau Hotel

Location: Miami, USA
Movie Appearance: Goldfinger

Of all the hotels shown throughout the Bond series, the Fontainbleau stands as the most notable. Its iconic white curves, designed and built by famed architect Morris Lapidus on the Harvey Firestone estate, are shown in a sweeping aerial shot immediately after the opening credits of Goldfinger. The pool area is also the first of many locations where Bond gets the upper hand of Auric Goldfinger by thwarting his elaborate carding cheat from afar — taking some time, of course, to “pat down” his voluptuous accomplice in the process.

This exposure in the 1964 hit simply solidified the Fontainbleau’s reputation as the most happening hotel in Miami, which started strong almost immediately after the hotel opened ten years earlier in 1954. Repeated visits by greats like Elvis and Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, as well as continued appearances on television shows and other films like Scarface continued to keep the party rolling.

In 2008, the historic hotel completed a billion dollar makeover in an attempt to regain its status as a top destination in the crowded Miami hotel scene. Shortly after the renovation, the hotel was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Learn More: Here

Hotel Cala Di Volpe

Location: Sardinia, Italy
Movie Appearance: The Spy Who Loved Me

This super-exclusive 125-room resort on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda has long maintained a mystique as the summer playground for the world’s billionaires and routinely tops lists as one of the most expensive hotels in the world. Though it’s designed to resemble a traditional Italian fishing village, the hotel’s private marina is home only to the yachts of its frequent guests, who include Heidi Klum, Denzel Washington and Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich. Roger Moore leveraged the glamorous local for his own brand of bedroom diplomacy with KGB agent Amasova in the 1977 movie The Spy Who Loved Me, but in true Bond fashion, their room in the film was actually the hotel’s piano bar.

Learn More: Here

The One & Only Ocean Club Resort

Location: Paradise Island, Bahamas
Movie Appearance: Casino Royale

Paradise Island’s The One & Only Ocean Club resort is the first of many exotic locations Bond visits on his hunt for Le Chiffre during the franchise reboot Casino Royale. The hotel originated as the private estate of Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren, who then sold it to the heir of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, Huntington Hartford II, in 1962. Hartford transformed the grounds into a luxury 52-room hotel with an 18-hole golf course — complete with a 12th-century Augustinian cloister shipped piece-by-piece from France. The valet and driveway shown in the film (where Bond gets mistaken for a valet and eventually burns the tires yet again in a classic Aston Martin DB5) is actually the rear entrance to the current facility, which connects directly with the library that’s also filmed for a moment.

Learn More: Here

The Grand Hotel Europe

Location: St. Petersburg, Russia
Movie Appearance: Goldeneye

The Grand Hotel Europe never actually appeared in Goldeneye. Instead, the hotel’s exterior was “faked” using the Langham Hotel in London; the interiors shown were sets. The fact that the film creators took such measures to leverage the reputation of this historic 19th century St. Petersburg institution, which routinely vies for the title of the most luxurious five-star hotel in the city, should say something about the Grand Hotel Europe’s status in eyes of the global elite. Brosnan may have faked his way into the guest logs, but greats throughout the last century including Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, H.G. Wells, Stravinsky and Gustav V certainly didn’t.

Learn More: here

Bonus: The Ritz

Location: London, England
Movie Appearance: Diamonds Are Forever

Ian Fleming and his wife were apparently frequent guests of the Ritz’s dining room, so it’s no surprise that the neoclassical London institution made its way to the silver screen in the 1971 film Diamonds Are Forever. Bond opted to check in based on the advice of jewel thief Tiffany Case (see what they did there?), but Tea at the hotel’s opulent Palm Court is a must-visit for tourists in search of an experience — it’s been the service of choice for countless leaders and cultural figures including King Edward VII, Queen Elizabeth, Sir Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin.

Learn More: Here

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Still not satisfied with the selection? Then be sure to check out the Goldeneye Resort where Ian Fleming penned all of the Bond novels. Don’t miss the rest of our Bond Week content either.

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