Why you should experience Omni San Francisco Hotel in San Francisco, California.
Omni San Francisco Hotel is a banker's heritage hotel where Financial District's mercantile ambition, Renaissance Revival architecture, cable-car culture and century-spanning relationship with finance converge inside the former Financial Center Building.
Set along California Street near Montgomery Street and just steps from California Street cable car line, the hotel occupies a 15-story steel-frame building designed by San Francisco architect Frederick H. Meyer and completed in 1927 as a center for banks and financial offices. Meyer gave the structure a Florentine Renaissance character, with a formal stone exterior leading into interiors distinguished by Italian marble, Austrian crystal chandeliers, dark wood and the ceremonial scale expected of a building conceived for the city's financial establishment. The Financial Center Building remained tied to banking before sitting vacant for nearly a decade, preserving an unusually substantial architectural shell at one of California Street's defining intersections until Omni Hotels & Resorts acquired it in 2002. The result is a hotel where Frederick H. Meyer, the Financial Center Building and Omni Hotels & Resorts connect Financial District's banking culture with a purpose-built 1920s financial tower recast for twenty-first-century hospitality.
What you should know about Omni San Francisco Hotel.
Omni San Francisco Hotel is best known for opening in 2002 after Omni Hotels & Resorts invested millions transforming the long-vacant Financial Center Building into a 362-room hotel while retaining the building's Florentine Renaissance character and restoring its surviving architectural fabric. The conversion preserved original Italian marble and Austrian crystal chandeliers within the lobby, translating materials created for a financial institution into the defining ceremonial elements of the new hotel. Historic Hotels of America admitted Omni San Francisco Hotel in 2010 through the National Trust for Historic Preservation program, while Historic Hotels Worldwide followed in 2013 and recognition from Condé Nast Traveler, Egencia and U.S. News & World Report accumulated during the property's hotel chapter. Omni's reconstruction, 362-room program, preserved marble and crystal work, 2010 Historic Hotels of America induction and 2013 Historic Hotels Worldwide membership established the property as a hotel whose contemporary character remains inseparable from the architecture Omni inherited at 500 California Street.
Bob's Steak & Chop House developed another property-specific chapter when the Dallas-born steakhouse opened on the ground floor of the newly created Omni San Francisco Hotel on February 11, 2002, beginning a relationship that ultimately helped reshape Omni's national restaurant portfolio. Omni Hotels acquired a 50 percent stake in Bob's in 2009 after a partnership the company traced directly to the San Francisco hotel in 2002, with Omni president Mike Deitemeyer subsequently positioning Bob's as an important component of the company's food-and-beverage strategy. Executive Chef Thomas Rhodes later connected the restaurant directly to the building through eight rooftop beehives tended by beekeeper Roger Garrison, producing 300 pounds of honey used in Rhodes's pancake and waffle butter, cheese presentations and cocktails including the Bee's Knees and Honey Blossom Margarita. Together, Bob's Steak & Chop House, Mike Deitemeyer, Thomas Rhodes and Roger Garrison extend Omni San Francisco Hotel's story from the 2002 conversion into a restaurant partnership born at the property and a rooftop apiary whose harvest entered the cooking and cocktails served downstairs.
How to fold Omni San Francisco Hotel into your trip.
Omni San Francisco Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing banking power, mechanical ingenuity and modernist ambition through Financial District.
Begin at Wells Fargo Museum, where the company founded by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo in 1852 preserves the stagecoaches, correspondence, banking artifacts and Gold Rush material associated with a business that carried landmark, mail and passengers across the rapidly expanding American West. Continue to Cable Car Museum, housed within the Washington-Mason powerhouse where the operating machinery still pulls San Francisco's cable network, alongside historic cars including Clay Street Hill Railroad No. 8 from Andrew Hallidie's pioneering system that began service in 1873. Conclude at Transamerica Pyramid, where Transamerica president John R. Beckett commissioned architect William Pereira for the 48-story, 853-foot tower completed in 1972, its tapered profile concentrating floor area toward the base while preserving greater exposure to daylight at street level. The progression moves from Wells and Fargo's nineteenth-century financial network through Hallidie's cable technology into Beckett and Pereira's corporate modernism, revealing the banking, engineering and architectural forces surrounding Omni San Francisco Hotel.
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