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The St. Regis San Francisco
San Francisco, California, United States · St. Regis · Grand Luxury
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's St. Regis Museum Tower opened in 2005 beside SFMOMA with the Museum of the African Diaspora on its first three floors, a hotel that literally shares its base with a cultural institution. At completion it was billed as the tallest concrete building west of the Mississippi. Xi Jinping stayed in the presidential suite during APEC 2023; a 2022 remodel refreshed the Forbes Five-Star house.
- 376 rooms
- Opened 2005
- Neighborhood: Union Square
- Rooms from 450 sq ft (42 m²)
- Architect: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
About The St. Regis San Francisco
- Construction began in 2001; the 40-story tower opened in 2005 at Mission and Third in SoMa.
- The Museum of the African Diaspora occupies the first three floors of the same building as the hotel.
- Inventory includes about 90 suites within roughly 376 total hotel units above the museum podium.
- General Secretary Xi Jinping stayed in the presidential suite during the November 2023 APEC meetings.
History
The tower that anchors the St. Regis San Francisco was conceived in the late 1990s as a new kind of hotel — one that would belong to its arts district the way a museum does, embedded in its cultural context rather than simply adjacent to it. The decision to place the hotel immediately beside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the SoMa district shaped every subsequent choice. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the firm that has defined American commercial architecture from the Lever House to the Sears Tower, won the commission and delivered a forty-story glass and steel tower that opened in November 2005 after construction began in 2001.
The building's ground floor became home to the Museum of the African Diaspora — a museum of Black art and history that was embedded into the hotel's base as a condition of the development, making the St. Regis Museum Tower one of the only luxury hotels in the world to physically house a permanent cultural institution within its structure. The tower rises above the museum floors as a sleek glass curtain wall, its restrained modernism a deliberate contrast to SFMOMA's bold masonry volumes across Third Street.
SoMa, the neighborhood south of Market Street that runs from the Bay toward the Mission District, spent most of the twentieth century as a light-industrial and warehouse zone before transforming in the 1990s into San Francisco's arts and technology corridor. The St. Regis arrived at the moment the neighborhood had fully established its cultural identity: Yerba Buena Gardens, the Moscone Center, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the California Historical Society were all within a few minutes' walk. The hotel's position made it simultaneously the most arts-adjacent luxury address in the city and one of the most convenient for the convention and technology business that drives much of San Francisco's hotel economy.
The property has held a Forbes Five-Star designation every year since it opened in 2005, a run that has outlasted changes in ownership, a major earthquake, and the pandemic disruptions of the early 2020s. The St. Regis Bar introduced the signature Bloody Mary variant for San Francisco — another iteration of the cocktail lineage that began at the King Cole Bar in New York — while the rooms' rainfall showers and soaking tubs, open to the room with optional privacy screens, became a signature design detail widely emulated in high-design hospitality that followed. After more than two decades, the museum hotel that Skidmore built for SoMa remains the neighborhood's most distinguished address.
The setting
Anchored at 125 Third Street in San Francisco's South of Market district, The St. Regis San Francisco occupies a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill tower opened in 2005 at the heart of the Yerba Buena cultural corridor. SFMOMA is a one-minute walk, Union Square nine minutes on foot, and the hotel shares its base with the Museum of the African Diaspora — the only San Francisco address where two major cultural institutions occupy the same building. Yerba Buena Gardens and the Moscone Convention Center lie steps away, placing the St. Regis at the axis of the city's art, convention, and technology economy.
Restaurants and bars
- Astra at The St. Regis San Francisco — Bar · Bar
Amenities
- Full-service luxury spa and fitness center
- 24-hour Signature St. Regis Butler Service
- Indoor heated pool
- Connected to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) complex
- Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star designation maintained since 2005 opening
- Fine dining
- Pet-friendly
Awards
- AAA Four Diamond (2026)
- Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star (2026)
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St. Regis in The Maison: the brand's idea, history and every house on the atlas.