In Sofia Coppola’s 2010 film Somewhere, very little happens. It’s glorious: Johnny Marco, a divorced leading man in between gigs, moves into the Chateau Marmont, where he spends his days smoking copious cigs, sunning by the pool, drinking beers in the garden, and playing cards in the lobby. The Chateau is a legendarily debauched place, the site of Jim Morrison’s wildest days and John Belushi’s overdose death. Half of Hollywood has a naughty Chateau story. But Somewhere makes the case that it’s way more glamorous (and only slightly less depraved) to spend your days there not destroying your room but doing, well, nothing at all. At the Chateau, even Marco’s crushing ennui looks sexy.
Nicholson on the balcony of room 69, one floor above Johnny Marco's preferred suite.
You might think reality couldn’t possibly achieve the pure vibes of a Coppola movie, of Stephen Dorff meandering around a private oasis while a Strokes demo plays in the background. You’d be wrong!
Since mid-March, when the American hospitality industry ground to a standstill and hotels everywhere emptied out, a handful of long-term Chateau residents have had the towering Italianate castle essentially to themselves. It’s a group that includes Luka Sabbat, actor Duke Nicholson, the stylist George Cortina, and a rotating cast of well-heeled transients like Keanu Reeves and Samantha Blake Cohen (daughter of recently jailed Trump fixer Michael). Together they’ve turned the Chateau into a clubhouse, salon, film and photoshoot set, and ultra-exclusive hideaway, all rolled into one. Call it the world’s most refined hype house.
Like many aspiring actors before him, Sabbat took up residency at the Chateau when he arrived in Hollywood in 2017, after landing his first TV role on Freeform’s Grown-ish. After an unwitting employer first put him up in the hotel for a modeling gig, living anywhere else simply wouldn’t do. “I never wanted to leave ever again. And… I haven’t!” he laughed. Since then, the 22-year-old influencer and creative has fully embraced the aesthetic of hotel living. His fit pics began to feature bathrobes and Lebowski shades, and while in Europe, the hotel’s green silk tassel keychain would hang from his belt.
Sabbat was in New York when the city began shutting down, and like countless kids his age, he returned home as soon as he could. Home, of course, meaning the hotel: “New York was really depressing at the beginning of Covid when everybody was super quarantined, and I was like, I gotta get the fuck out of here and go to the Chateau,” he said, sitting poolside on a recent afternoon. “I checked in and there were three people in the whole hotel,” he said. Most of the staff had been laid off, and there was only a skeleton crew manning the building. The restaurant, bar, and room service were shut down—a nightmare at other hotels, but a strange blessing for the Chateau quarantine crew. “It was the best. My favorite place in LA for once was not crowded… It felt like we were squatting in a castle,” Sabbat said.
The guest list has shifted over the months, but Sabbat, Nicholson, and Cortina have been a constant. The three, Sabbat said, hang out “every day.” An actor like his grandfather Jack, you might recognize the 20-year-old Nicholson from the cover of Lana Del Ray’s Norman Fucking Rockwell—or from Page Six, as Bella Hadid’s rumored boyfriend. Cortina, a GQ contributor who has styled cover stars like Brad Pitt and Reeves for the magazine, has stayed at the Chateau since it was the cheapest hotel in West Hollywood at $80 a night, making him the elder statesman of the bunch. The three are practically inseparable; Nicholson says his friends have begun referring to him and Sabbat as “Duka,” and when Thom Browne featured Sabbat in a lookbook for the label’s F.C. Barcelona capsule collection, it was shot on hotel grounds and featured a cameo from the full crew. Friends like Margaret Qualley and Cara Delevigne occasionally came through for dinner. But for the most part, Sabbat, Nicholson, and Cortina were sealed off from the world, making contact with the outside only when Jon + Vinny’s arrived via Postmates.
“It was,” Cortina said, “like a really weird commune.”
Ever since its doors opened in 1929, the Chateau has been known for its colorful cast of residents—artists, actors, writers, photographers, and Hollywood hangers-on attracted by its location on Sunset Boulevard, and, crucially, a reputation for discretion. Some residents have contributed handsomely to the hotel’s reputation as a place where you can lead a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, like Morrison, Neil Young, and Lindsay Lohan, who was famously booted from the hotel in 2012 after racking up a $46,000 bill over the course of her several-month stay. Others over the years have been attracted by the privacy afforded by having a little room tucked away in a corner of a castle: the likes of Hedi Slimane and Helmut Newton have called it home for extended periods of work and relaxation. These days, now that the Chateau is no longer a Hollywood secret and room prices have risen to five-star levels, guests are attracted by a very 2020 allure: the flex.
The pandemic, of course, changed the dynamic. “On the average day we stumble out of bed around noon, and then sit by the pool for a little bit, make a lot of jokes, order some food, jump in the pool, fuck around, and then eat dinner,” Nicholson recalled. “There’s no schedule, but we find ourselves repeating the same things a lot.” At night Sabbat would occasionally commandeer the empty bar in the lobby “living room” while they listened to records and played backgammon. “It’s a huge living room, so it was like being in a country house in LA. It was a very nice vibe,” Cortina said. In Somewhere, Marco’s aimless reverie and illicit rendezvous with various fellow guests is interrupted by press junkets and the sudden arrival of his 11-year-old daughter—real-life stuff. In the midst of the pandemic, the Chateau was more like the NBA bubble, if the NBA bubble was in a real Disney castle where you can smoke in your room.
Noah Dillon, far right, served as DP on Nicholson and Sabbat's as-yet-unnamed movie.
Having the lobby record player to themselves was nice, sure, but eventually the boredom got to Sabbat and Nicholson. So what do two actors in a massive empty hotel do with months of empty time on their hands? “Duke and I were drinking one day and we were so bored, and we were like, we should do something,” Sabbat said. “[Duke] was like, ‘Should we make a movie?’”
And so, at the end of June, Duke and Luka spent three days filming a revenge thriller in the hotel, with the two of them sharing duties as co-stars and co-directors. They’re coy on specifics, but the project shares DNA with both Somewhere and the one-man movie Marc Jacobs made while holed up in Chateau owner Andre Balasz’s empty Mercer Hotel at around the same time. With carte blanche to film in the hotel courtesy of Balasz, the boys borrowed a film camera from Giovanni Ribisi, brought on model Charlotte D’Alessio and rapper A$AP Nast to round out the cast, and assembled a small crew. Cortina, naturally, served as stylist; Slimane, the hotel’s patron saint of fashion, kitted the cast out in Celine. It was a step up from what they’re used to as Hollywood up-and-comers. “We’re both trying to act,” Nicholson said, “but every role we get sent is something awful, so we were like, Let’s just write something that’s exactly what we want to play.” They’re pleased with the result. “The hotel has never really been captured like this,” Sabbat added. “It’s been captured in many different ways, but we made it feel like a ghost town. There’s no one else but these two people in the whole hotel.”
There are fancier places to stay in L.A., and plenty of hotels with bigger pools. But according to the residents, the Chateau still has the romantic allure that has turned it into one of fashion photographers’ favorite backdrops and incubated cultural touchstones like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ By The Way, recorded in a suite on the seventh floor. “There’s just something about this place that’s inspiring and really free,” Sabbat said. Launched by pure boredom, Sabbat and Nicholson’s as-yet-untitled film nevertheless became their love letter to the hotel, and their contribution to its long and twisted artistic legacy. “It definitely still has a mystique,” Nicholson said. “The other day I was reading about Montgomery Clift, who’s my favorite actor ever, and how he got in a car crash and was recovering in one of the rooms—you hear shit like that all the time. I think part of the reason people stay here is based on the hope that one day people will be talking about them and they’ll continue the tradition of these stories.”
Though life on the inside has never been better, the Chateau has faced unprecedented pressures, both due to the pandemic—according to an industry group, American hotels had lost over $124 billion by the end of the summer, and the unemployment rate in the accommodations sector hit 38%—and hotel management itself. In July, Balasz announced that he would be transforming the Chateau into a private club by the end of the year, a plan that some former employees reportedly saw as a scheme to bust a nascent union. In October, The Hollywood Reporter detailed how management allegedly allowed a culture of employee mistreatment by guests to flourish.
The residents brushed it off as bad behavior by guests who don’t understand the codes of the hotel, which has a blacklist several hundred people long. “The place has a certain reputation which is Hollywood and parties, but it’s not all crazy shit,” Sabbat said. “Some people who don’t really stay here, all they know is the party aspect of it, they come here thinking that’s what it’s going to be, they start acting absolutely wild, and it’s like, ‘Who are you, man?’” Sabbat explained the keys to being a good longterm Chateau guest thusly: “Treat everybody with respect, and mind your fucking business! That’s it. And that’s the rules of life.”
Though they’re not concerned about whether the hotel becomes a club or not—needless to say, they’re already members—Sabbat and Nicholson are starting to think about what’s next. They both landed roles in a “slasher type” horror movie shooting next month, and as summer turns to fall the fundamental unsustainability of their lifestyle has begun to dawn on them. “I can’t live like this forever. I’m 22, so it’s fine now, but one day I have to have a house and a family and shit like that,” Sabbat said.
“It’s not necessarily a healthy life, you know? But it’s the perfect place to be while there’s nothing else going on in the world,” Nicholson added. “Unfortunately it will come to an end. But do I want to leave? No, not really. I’ve become pretty comfortable.”
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