Hotel California Cover — Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles

The cover of the Eagles' 1977 album "Hotel California" was photographed at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 9641 Sunset Boulevard — the iconic pink Streamline Moderne hotel that has been a fixture of Los Angeles luxury since 1912. Photographer David Alexander shot the building at dusk, capturing the hotel's warm-lit facade against a darkening sky in a composition that perfectly conveyed the album's themes of glamorous excess and its discontents: California as a place of seductive beauty and spiritual emptiness simultaneously.

The "Hotel California" title track — with its opening acoustic guitar figure by Don Felder and its lyric about a mysterious place where "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" — is one of the most analysed songs in rock and was written as a meditation on the music industry and the California lifestyle more broadly. The album also contains "Life in the Fast Lane," "Wasted Time," and "New Kid in Town" — a collection of songs that demonstrated the Eagles' mastery of polished, lyrically sophisticated California rock. It has sold over 32 million copies worldwide.

The Beverly Hills Hotel continues to operate as one of Los Angeles's premier luxury hotels and is instantly recognisable from its distinctive pink exterior and the banana-leaf wallpaper of the Polo Lounge inside. It is a regular destination for Eagles fans seeking to photograph the building from the album cover angle — the entry on Sunset Boulevard with the hotel rising behind palm trees is unchanged from 1976. The hotel itself makes no particular commercial use of the album connection, which only adds to its mystique.