Why you should experience Hotel Spero, Vignette Collection in San Francisco, California.
Hotel Spero, Vignette Collection is a resolute heritage hotel where Tenderloin's reformist history, Spanish Colonial craftsmanship, philanthropic tradition and instinct for reinvention converge within the former Hotel Californian.
Set along Taylor Street near O'Farrell Street and just steps from Glide Memorial Church, the building opened in 1923 as Matthew A. Little's upscale apartment-hotel, designed by prolific San Francisco architect Edward E. Young in Renaissance Revival form around a Spanish Colonial Revival lobby. Architect Alfred Henry Jacobs returned in 1929 for a four-story addition that introduced Art Deco elements including pressed-metal panels, balconies and elaborate cornice work, while the original interior retained twisted columns, decorative ironwork and a beamed ceiling. Philanthropist Elizabeth Snyder Glide and Glide Foundation acquired Hotel Californian in 1935 and operated it as San Francisco's only temperance hotel until 1978, connecting the property directly with Glide's wider network of Methodist philanthropy and the nearby church she established in memory of Joseph Glide. The result is a hotel where Edward E. Young, Alfred Henry Jacobs, Matthew A. Little and Elizabeth Snyder Glide connect Tenderloin's architectural and social history through more than a century of hospitality.
What you should know about Hotel Spero.
Hotel Spero, Vignette Collection is best known for emerging under its present character in April 2018 after a $16 million reconstruction led by Perkins+Will and Jacqueline McGee, which restored the painted ceiling beams, marble floors, original reception desk and decorative grillage while introducing a contemporary art program centered on San Francisco. The project transformed 236 guestrooms and suites through carved credenzas, custom Tangram-inspired headboards and a palette derived from Spanish design, while super-scaled images of Spanish dancers and musicians entered the public spaces and a custom glass-printed portrait of Elizabeth Snyder Glide became the visual centerpiece behind reception. Hotel Spero joined IHG Hotels & Resorts' Vignette Collection in February 2025 as the brand's first California property and first opening on the West Coast, entering a collection launched globally in 2021 while remaining independently owned by an affiliate of Fairwood Capital and operated by Aperture Hotels. The Vignette affiliation introduced a property-specific Memorable Ritual built around the Latin meaning of Spero, “I hope,” through postcards carrying messages to future selves that the hotel mails on dates selected by their writers.
Bar Esper opened in May 2026 as the property's newest authored chapter, replacing Jasper's Corner Tap & Kitchen with a restaurant developed by Spark3 Hospitality in collaboration with Orcun Turkay, Vice President of Food & Beverage for Crestline Hotels & Resorts, around the historical exchange between Portuguese and Japanese port cultures. The kitchen connects those traditions through preparations including flame-grilled peri-peri chicken, pork belly with clams in tomato-saffron broth and an ebi katsu sandwich with shrimp, cabbage slaw, peri-peri chile crisp and sesame dressing, while the wine program emphasizes Iberian producers and Japanese whisky, Madeira, Port and sake deepen the drinks vocabulary. Bartender Jacques Bezuidenhout authored cocktails including Castaway, combining Christian Drouin Calvados with kummel, grapefruit, lime, honey and mint, extending a career associated with San Francisco cocktail culture directly into the hotel's new restaurant. Together, Spark3 Hospitality, Orcun Turkay, Jacques Bezuidenhout and Bar Esper advance Hotel Spero's century-long story through a dining concept whose Portuguese word Esperança, meaning hope, deliberately echoes the Latin Spero and turns the property's name into the organizing idea for its newest creative chapter.
How to fold Hotel Spero into your trip.
Hotel Spero, Vignette Collection works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing social reform, performance culture and the preservation of Tenderloin's unusually dense urban history.
Begin at GLIDE Memorial Church, where Elizabeth Snyder Glide established the foundation in 1929 before Reverend Cecil Williams arrived in 1963 and, with poet Janice Mirikitani, developed GLIDE into a nationally influential center for civil rights and social action whose history encompasses the 1964 Council on Religion and Homosexuality, Williams's 1965 Selma march with Martin Luther King Jr. and a congregation that eventually exceeded 11,000 members. Continue to Tenderloin Museum, created from Uptown Tenderloin, Inc., an organization founded in 2009 that helped secure the national Uptown Tenderloin Historic District encompassing 409 buildings before opening the museum in 2015, where exhibitions, resident-led walking tours and theatrical programming preserve the neighborhood's immigrant, labor, nightlife and LGBTQ histories. Conclude at Curran Theatre, the 1922 Geary Street theater commissioned by producer Homer Curran and designed by Alfred Henry Jacobs, bringing the architect responsible for Hotel Californian's 1929 expansion back into the surrounding district through another enduring expression of San Francisco's early twentieth-century building culture. The progression moves from Glide and Williams's social reform through the Tenderloin Museum's preservation of neighborhood memory into Jacobs's theatrical architecture, revealing the unusually interconnected cultural history surrounding Hotel Spero.
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